Virtual Reality day 1

Today was a very cool day. This week the Villanova Professors are here visiting us and most importantly working on the virtual reality tours for the Vatican. Today we had the opportunity to help do some of the VR for St. Mary Major. 5 different VR tours in fact.

If you haven't seen what the VR tours look like, go look at them on the Vatican site (click basilicas on the bottom left hand corner of the main page).

The virtual reality tours are created through a series of photographs being stitched together to create the 360 degree panorama. This means taking somewhere between 60 to 250 pictures, depending on the place being created, and linking them all together so they look like you are actually there.

This is all done by a computer/robotic rig that when set up properly, takes pictures at consistent intervals so they can be stitched together easily, and so that no corner goes missed when photographing it. Cue drum roll for a short (little shaky) video of the rig:




See that? It rotates around on its own to get the pictures taken (It was taking pictures of the ceiling in that clip, which are awesome).

So while the rig is busy taking pictures (5 minutes for the small rig which takes 63 pictures, 20 minutes or so for the big rig that takes 240 pictures) our job is to make sure no one steps directly in front of the camera, which would block part of the church. The camera rotates, so it makes it tricky seeing as how one minute its facing towards the altar, and the next it's facing towards the back of the church, so we move people around accordingly, using our broken Italian to shuffle them aside.

The Church is normally dark during visiting hours, but for this special occasion they turned all the lights on in the church for us. Every single one. It was incredible to see it lit up, the gold detail in the ceiling and artwork glimmering. I have some pictures of it, and you can compare between my last visit to the church and this time.

Tomorrow is Saint Peters. It will be my first time there and I am extremely excited. You can expect a longer blog post about the Virtual Reality tours tomorrow, I'll label this one as a teaser.