Virtual Reality at Stowe Landscape Gardens
John D. Tatter
Professor of English
Birmingham-Southern College
The Proposal
I propose to use the summer of 2000 to add a virtual reality component to my Web site on Stowe Landscape Gardens, Buckinghamshire, England. The URL for the site is http://panther.bsc.edu/~jtatter/stowe.html. Using several new series of photographs and Live Picture Reality Studio software, I will create 360-degree panoramas both of the interiors of garden buildings and out-of-doors at key viewing points in the gardens. A visitor to my site will be able to use his or her mouse to control the direction and magnification of the views from a particular point.
Background and Institutional Support
As a teacher and scholar I am particularly interested in the cultural and cross-disciplinary context for the literature of the 18th century. In the summer of 1991, I received my first faculty development grant from the Birmingham-Southern College to study English landscape gardens. I spent two weeks photographing and videotaping over a dozen sites. I continue to use these images in my upper-division courses in 18th-century literature, where they serve as background and context for the 18th-century pastoral and nature poetry as well as the novel. I used them extensively, for example, when I recently taught the senior English seminar on Jane Austen’s novels, most of which are set on the country estates of the landed gentry. Austen compares the "improvement" of those estates (the development of their gardens and parks) to the development of the landed gentry as the social and political leadership of the nation.
In the summer of 1993, I received a second faculty development grant from the College to spend a month at Stowe Landscape Gardens as a volunteer for the National Trust in its restoration of the temples and monuments there. During my month working as an amateur stone mason and actually living in one of the garden buildings, I became intimately familiar with the overall design of the gardens and with the specific features of certain areas and certain structures. Details such as which buildings receive the morning sun and which ones the evening sun, for example, are important elements of the symbolic messages embedded in the design. "Reading" the possible meanings in a garden feature has become an exercise that I assign to students to alert them to multiple meanings in a work of literature. The visual art helps them understand the verbal art.
It was after this experience living and working in the garden that I began to look for ways in which I could give my students the ability to move through a landscape at their own pace and to study its elements according to their own needs and interests. I realized that a Web-based tutorial would offer my students the most freedom because I could make it interactive, and I eventually went online in November 1996 with the skeleton of what has now become an extensive site. Initially I offered a description and history of each area of the gardens, and photographs and commentary on each of 33 buildings in the gardens and surrounding park, as well as an interactive glossary of architecture and gardening terms.
Thanks to a third faculty development grant in the summer of 1997, during which I spent a week photographing the garden in greater detail, I was able to complete the most visually important part of the Web site: a virtual tour of the gardens. An interactive map in one frame allows a visitor to click on any of over 160 arrows in order to see the view from that point in a second frame. Clicking on successive arrows allows one to move through the garden or to view a garden feature from different perspectives. Thus, as opposed to being controlled either by the order of a printed guidebook or by the order of a videotaped garden tour, visitors using this interactive map take control of the garden visit into their own hands. It was when I added the interactive map that the Web site became most useful in my course EH 349 Literature and the Arts, because my students could virtually tour the gardens on their own, following whatever itinerary they pleased. At any point, they could link to the page devoted to whatever particular garden feature they were seeing on the map and stop to read about its history if they so chose. Most important, they could develop their own opinions about the significance of garden features rather than simply accept the opinions of their professor.
The Importance of Virtual Reality Panoramas
Last spring term when I most recently taught EH 349, my students told me that while they enjoyed moving through the virtual garden on the interactive map, the individual pictures there did not give them as much of a sense of space and spatial relationships between the garden buildings as they would have liked. They wanted to "stand" in a particular spot and "look around." They also wanted to be able to "step inside" some of the temples and "explore" the interiors. The only way that I can provide my Web site visitors with these opportunities is through Virtual Reality Panoramas. Even more important, for me to teach landscape gardens both as art forms and as "readable" landscapes, the ability to see garden buildings in juxtaposition is essential. The garden visitor must be able to look back and forth and, if possible, zoom in on details.
Live Picture Reality Studio provides the means to create these virtual reality panoramas. Its functions include a "panorama stitcher," which combines and integrates individual photographs into a seamless panorama; an "object modeler," which combines photographs to allow a viewer to see an object from all sides; and server and viewer functions that allow these images to be distributed over the Web. The software is Windows-based and compatible with Adobe Photoshop, which I use to create digital images from my garden photographs.
Live Picture Reality Studio software will also allow me to create "hot spots" within each panorama that can provide links either to existing pages on the garden feature being viewed, to a second panorama from that viewpoint, or to a 3D image of the monument, statue, or temple that can be rotated in a full circle.
Mechanisms for Assessment and Sharing of Results
Birmingham-Southern provides in its standard optical-scan course evaluation forms a space for optional questions written by the individual instructor. I will include a series of questions specific to the Stowe Web site on my evaluation forms when I next teach EH 349 in the spring of 2001. I plan to require a narrative evaluation as well, with specific questions about the interactivity of the Web site. If possible, I will also contact students from previous sections of the course and get their response to the new features of the Web site.
On a wider scale, I will ask faculty members who use the site in their courses to assess the new virtual reality component and to pass along student comments. I know of two faculty members at other institutions who use the site regularly: Michael Leslie at Rhodes College, and Jonathan Smith at the University of Michigan. I would not have found out about the latter had I not recently installed a counter on the site that indicates the source of referrals and hits. I expect that, as the word spreads, more and more professors of 18th-century literature will require their students to complete Web-based assignments and exercises that include touring my site. I will certainly contact the English departments at ACS institutions outlining the features of the site and inviting them to make what use of it they wish. (I will contact the Art departments as well – I was recently asked by the Webmistress at Edinburgh College of Art if she could create a link to my site from their College Web page so that their Landscape Architecture students could have east access to it.) Feedback from these users provides the best assessment because they include practical as well as scholarly comments on the material and the design.
Finally, I will contact the members of the ACS Teaching Technology Workshop held here at the College during the last two summers and ask for their assessment. These colleagues are already familiar with the site, and several of them have encouraged me to explore the possibilities of virtual reality for use in the site. They will be the best judges of site design since they are actively involved in their own creation and use of Web-based teaching materials. They will also be important in spreading the word to their own immediate colleagues about the site and its possible applications to courses.
I will also be happy to act as a mentor to my colleagues here at Birmingham-Southern and at our sister ACS institutions in the use of this software and its applications to teaching. I imagine applications, for example, in theatre set design, in sculpture, in architectural studies, and perhaps even in anatomy and archeology. Any discipline that requires a student to study an object from all angles or to take in the panoramic view from a particular spot can benefit from this teaching technology.