Metaverse In Architectural Heritage Documentation & Education

Ashraf A. Gaafar

Permanent Faculty -Assistant Prof. of Architecture – Faculty of Engineering – Shoubra – Banha University. ashgaafar@yahoo.com.

Abstract:

At the beginning of 2019, the problem of Covid-19 began to appear and develop in a rapid and dramatic manner. The pandemic has hit architectural education institutions around the world. Traditional architectural education has been questioned, lost forever in universities which have been urged to abandon all face-to-face teaching methods & begin to use distance-learning methods. This forced these schools to become adaptive systems, they must include change, flexibility, and adaptation as part of the curriculum structure, studio design practices, and teaching and learning processes.

The Researcher suggests to use the Metaverse Virtual Environment in Architecture Education to make an interactive relation between architecture students & their professors & instructors without Physical existence to avoid Covid-19 problems. This Paper examines how to teach History of Architecture courses via Metaverse by presenting a scientific and practical framework, in a realistic attempt based on the current actual capabilities available in Egypt, which may produce a fully immersive virtual copy of any heritage building that may be subjected to interactive 3D documentation. The practical part of this paper presents a fully immersive scale 1:1 interactive virtual reality model of a Pharaonic tomb to examine the possibility of the paper’s suggestion, and ends with a conclusion & recommendations that help any school of architecture to build a fully immersive VR models of any architectural building to use in teaching. The paper also suggests the main components required to build a fully immersive VR laboratory capable of producing interactive VR models.

Keywords: Metaverse, Archaeological Documentation, Architectural Education, Information Technology, Virtual Reality.

Pages: 66 – 86 | Full PDF Paper