Guildford Castle VR is an entertaining and educational historical experience which enables the user to virtually travel through space and time to explore one of England’s earliest castles.
From a Reality Capture blog.
How did you get the idea to create this VR project?
The idea for the project came from experiencing many VR cultural titles and realising the vast potential of this new medium to experience history and culture in an entirely new and immersive way. Whilst we found many excellent experiences, we were always left feeling that we wanted more, both in the level of immersion and the richness of the historical information. Our sole focus was to create a more comprehensive and engaging experience than before, combining a high level of virtual environment realism, meticulously researched historical reconstructions and a rich audio-visual narrative. We set ourselves the task of creating a virtual experience which would rival – and in some respects exceed – a real life visit to the site.
Project Workflow
Our first focus was on capturing and recreating the modern-day environment.
We used a FARO Focus S350 LiDAR scanner to scan the overall site and then processed a model in RealityCapture, providing us with an instant “white box” of millimetre accuracy. Throughout the creation of the modern-day environment, this served as an exact placement and shape reference for all assets: large structures, props and even the foliage.
We set out with an uncompromising approach to the data capture. Inevitably, current hardware limitations prohibit us from getting anywhere near the source quality, however we were keen to see how far we could push the quality of the models whilst still being optimised for VR. This meant taking a large number of high-resolution photographs: over 16,000 photographs in total for the castle keep, other structural assets and environment props, as well as over 100 LiDAR scans across the entire site.
For the complete article on Guildford Castle CLICK HERE.
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