Tunnel Vision: Immersive technology brings the tunnels of Vauquois, France to Blacksburg

[00:00:01] >> We have immersion environments studios at the library and we're currently building an exhibit to allow people to walk through a physical and virtual reconstruction of the village of folklore and the tunnels that were underneath it so qual was located in northeastern France near the City of their dawn during World War One and it was occupied by the Germans and the French we went over to evoke walk with a small team of 2016 to create an immersive environment to allow people to learn what it was like to be there or at work walk before and during the war going from a peaceful village on a hilltop to destroy the landscape and a vast array of tunnels underneath. [00:00:47] This trip the project was funded by hard cash and it had components that were originally shown in the CHU using the site Rama. My role is to take the virtual world of Obama and merge it with physical world so that they are as close as possible to each other in the real world we're going to be walking through a simulated tunnel based on the last dance so when you're touching real walls it feels like you're in the virtual wall and it's all lining up this project has been very exciting for me to work on trying to think about from a visual arts perspective how I can work with historians and educators geographers to infuse an artistic aspect into an educational simulation because this isn't just about showing someone a tunnel from World War One or putting it in a textbook This is about helping you feel like you're there and helping you understand what it meant for a soldier to be in a tunnel being shelled during that time and so it's about empathy and it's about feeling just as much as about information and history were really using a lot of advanced techniques that are forged out of researchers at computer science to allow people to feel like they're moving in. [00:02:00] Much larger space virtually to me are in the real world and I think I worked on was something called passive haptics and that's the R. term for when you have like a very low fidelity objects like a paint can for example and in the are it's much more high fidelity and so Todd had this idea is I want to have a person experiencing this carry on a lantern to kind of make them feel more there is also going to be a carving on one of the walls that people will be able to touch as they walk by which will hopefully work out and physical world and then the virtual world together this project is an example of the type of efforts that can happen through creativity and innovation just for 2 year where students and faculty from technical to artistic to humanities space disciplines can really come together to create something that's more than the sum of its parts.