ROCHLITZ VR

“Rochlitz VR” is a virtual reality app which we created for “Schlösserland Sachsen”. It’s a virtual reconstruction of one of the chambers from the old castle “Schloss Rochlitz” in Saxony, Germany. Today you can see the remains of 5 different periods from the 800 years long history of the “captain’s chamber” (Hauptmannsstube) in that room. Our app let’s the user experience the room like it was in the past.

INFO

CLIENT

Schlösserland Sachsen (Staatliche Schlösser, Burgen und Gärten Sachsen gemeinnützige GmbH)

WORK

Modeling, Shading, Rendering: Sebastian König
Programming, App Development: Simeon Conzendorf

YEAR

2016

TOOLS

Blender, Unity

The captain’s chamber is a really weird and crappy looking room. There are doors and traces of paint from the gothic period, the backwall of a fireplace and romanesque windows, a painted ceiling from the renaissance and on top of that plumbing, drillholes and wallpaper from the GDR (German Democratic Republic) period in Eastern Germany. Usually rooms like that are being restored to one particular time period. But then of course you lose the chance to see what the room would have looked like in other periods. In this case the castle museum wanted to make it clear to the visitors that the castle has been in constant change throughout the ages. Traces of all these periods can be found today. So the museum needed a way to make this room accessible and understandable for visitors without destroying its current peculiar state with all the various items from different time periods.

Virtual Reality turned out to be the perfect medium for this!
Together with conservators and museologists we reconstructed the captain’s chamber how it might have looked like in those 5 different periods. The Rochlitz Virtual Reality Experience will be shown on 4 Samsung Gear VR devices inside the captain’s chamber starting in spring 2017.

To achieve the most accurate digital reconstruction possible we worked closely together with the museum’s conservators and museologists, who would provide us with detailed information, data and measurements of the room and the various remains of the different time periods. After modeling, texturing and shading the room in Blender we rendered stereoscopic cubemaps, which were then brought to Unity, where we added the interactive elements. The focus driven user interface makes sure that the app is as intuitive as possible.