The Virtual Reality Project is an extension and outgrowth of our students' work for the Vatican's Internet Office. Every semester, the Communication Department sends a student intern to the Internet Office, who is charged with creating and editing multimedia content for the Vatican website. In the past, this has taken a variety of forms, from work toward a World Youth Day e-Learning site to the translating and formatting of documents for the main website.
In 2008, however, our own Prof. Paul Wilson and Chad Fahs, in conjunction with Prof. Frank Klassner from Computing Sciences, proposed something new: the Virtual Reality Project. This is a project which is intended to create extremely high quality multimedia tours of some of the most significant sites in Rome...to bring them to those, across the world, who are unable to make the pilgrimage to Rome.
Thanks to a generous gift from the Waterhouse Family, we were able to make a substantial investment in the cutting edge technologies necessary to create these tours. The hardware and software, combined with the expertise of our faculty and staff, have allowed us to reach levels of quality and precision that allow unprecedented views of the art and architecture of these sacred sites.
The first stages of the project began in Fall 2008, with the completion of a virtual reality tour of the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls (which will soon be posted on St. Paul's official website)...not to mention a test shoot of St. Peter's itself! These first projects were completed with the assistance of our intern in the Internet Office, Caroline Ford (Class of '10).
We continued this project in the Spring of 2009, with the assistance of our Internet Office intern, Samantha Coveleski (Class of '09). Together, the team shot the material which will be used to complete virtual tours of the Basilicas of St. Mary Major and St. John Lateran. These tours will be completed in the coming months, and will be posted on their official websites.
However, during this same semester, we were even more fortunate to receive permission to shoot a test tour for the Vatican Museums--and specifically, of the Sistine Chapel. Now this was no small honor: the Vatican Museums had never before granted this type of permission or access to the Sistine Chapel. As a result, Samantha was able to take part in, truly, a once-in-a-lifetime experience; we spent nearly 6 hours, at night (alone!), in the Sistine Chapel, completing our test shoot. Words cannot express the power of Michelangelo's art, without the crowds, the noise, and the rush--but our virtual tour will help bring this experience to people across the world.
We look forward to making more of these amazing sites accessible to a global audience, as our project continues into the 2009-10 academic year! Check back to this page for updates on our interns' adventures, and links to the "live" virtual tours!
