To develop interactive VR applications that realistically visualize historical buildings for restoration education in 3D and to train human resources who can develop these applications.
Our activitiesHistorical buildings are damaged or become unusable in time or due to reasons such as earthquakes, war, fire, which have much more destructive effects. Restoration works recycle these buildings; however, this process is complex and requires expertise. Therefore, students receive training on planning and carrying out restoration works in the architecture departments of higher education institutions. It has become necessary to provide this training via distance education due to obstacles to formal education, such as epidemics in the current and upcoming period. However, since this training is mostly requiring practice, it is quite difficult to provide this training with the conventional training methods in distance education. Because lecturers and students should examine the buildings to be restored together and make on-site measurements and analyses for the restoration work to be done. The fact that these works cannot be carried out on the building causes students to not receive a good education on restoration courses. In this project, therefore, VR applications will be developed to be used as an educational tool in the applied courses of architecture, especially in the field of restoration. This project will be a new approach to architectural restoration education. The developed VR content will have almost the same appearance as the real buildings. With the help of this software, the lecturers and students who wear the VR headset in restoration lessons will have the opportunity to interact with a historical building in a virtual class. They will be able to discuss the details of new restoration procedures that have been made or can be done in this environment. Thanks to these VR applications, the lecturers and students will be in the same virtual environment even if they are in different physical environments. In this context, we will design 3D models of targeted historical buildings and transfer these models to game engines and interactively visualize there. Then, we will implement various interaction techniques to these models by coding to provide interactive VR applications. We also develop an AI model which recognizes the user gesture automatically in VR applications. The administrative staff, academicians, students, and researchers in the fields of architecture and informatics from Karabuk University, Birmingham City University, and the University of Salento will participate in the project activities.