A Virtual Reality Experience for the Saint Paul’s Catacombs in Rabat, Malta
A Virtual Reality Experience for the Saint Paul’s Catacombs in Rabat, Malta
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A VR experience for a complex of underground Christian burial sites with challenging accessibility to people with impaired mobility.
A VR experience for a complex of underground Christian burial sites with challenging accessibility to people with impaired mobility.
My involvement within this project
My involvement within this project
I was one of the main programmers in a team assigned with implementing this virtual reality experience. Heritage Malta provided us with 3D models scanned inside the catacombs, which were placed into the Unity Game Engine to create a VR experience. Two versions were developed both making use of the Oculus Rift headset.
The first VR experience is a First-Person-Shooter VR implementation. This version imposed a number of drawbacks, amongst which is the fact that the uneven terrain inside the catacomb models may lead the user to experience sudden changes in elevation, or get stuck inside the model space. Furthermore, these abrupt changes contributed towards virtual sickness, whereby the user would feel dizzy while navigating through the virtual catacombs.
A second VR experience was created to overcome virtual sickness in which the user controls a virtual drone to be able to navigate through the St. Paul’s Catacombs complex. This worked by providing the user with fore and aft movement as well as a pivot function to ease turning around. The elevation of the drone was controlled by the viewing direction of the user, for instance: if the user wished to climb up a staircase, one would need to look up and push forward.
The overall result of this newer implementation was that a visitor would be able to explore more of the nooks and crannies of the virtual environment thus making this system much more accessible than the real catacombs. Being more accessible also provides people with mobility issues to experience the St Paul's Catacombs as well.
Both implementations of this Virtual Reality experience can be found at a kiosk at the St Paul's Catacombs complex in Rabat. It is also worth mentioning that this project acted as the basis for other projects such as those described with the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum.
A book chapter entitled "A Case Study into the User Experience of an Application of Virtual Reality at the Saint Paul’s Catacombs, Malta" was written for the book "Rediscovering Heritage Through Technology". It details all the work that was carried out for this project. It also discusses and evaluates the User Experience that one might experience with these implemented systems. One can read this chapter here.
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