The Historical Traces and Virtual Cities: Scenarios of Istanbul 

The workshop Historical Traces and Virtual Cities: Scenarios of Istanbul is based on reproducing the three-dimensional representation of predetermined areas of Istanbul in an immersive environment. The scenarios created in the Unity3D platform by the participants will later be edited and published online to be experienced via virtual reality systems and shared with the festival audience.  The overarching aim of the workshop is to introduce architecture students to the virtual reality environment to help them reproduce scenarios of Istanbul and gain experience in immersive systems.

COVID-19 dates the beginning of a change that we are completely unaware of and rapidly drifting in today by obliging us to shift our social lives radically. In addition to the wide use of online communication tools and software of digital media design, the technology of Virtual Reality(VR) systems, which is now predominantly used in the gaming field, will constitute a relatively new approach to architectural education. 

The interdisciplinary literature states that the extensive use of VR systems will mark a paradigm shift where the expensive technology of VR has left the domains of laboratory environments to the affordable use of the masses. The Historical Traces and Virtual Cities: Scenarios of Istanbul workshop is based on the idea that the participants construct a fictional virtual reality experience for the widely-used game engine platform of Unity3D. In our workshop, the participants addressed the three-dimensional traces of Istanbul in an immersive and design-oriented framework.   

During the first day of the workshop, the conceptual framework of Virtual Reality systems was discussed by focusing on the development in the fields of cognitive sciences and architecture. The participants later reproduced the three-dimensional representation of predetermined areas in Istanbul by reusing historical maps. Our overarching goal is to build an immersive environment of urbanization in Istanbul by integrating storytelling into a virtual reality platform. These visual narratives were edited by the workshop conductors, the co-leXer team, to be experienced online through head-mounted displays(HMD) such as VR goggles.   

In collaboration with: Miray Naz Kara, Tuğçe Taşkan

Participants:  Berkay Güney, Buse Aysal Aslan, Gizem Yücel, Gülce Erincik, İpek Eştürk, Miray Naz Kara, Selen Erdoğan, Tubanur Yavuz, Zeyneb Uzun