Nowdays Kazan in Virtual Reality

Here is the beautiful city of Kazan, right in front of your eyes and you, like Gulliver, look all the way down at it. Don’t worry, you’re not dead or daydreaming, you are in virtual reality!

United 3D Labs, commissioned by Polymedia company, has developed an interactive VR installation. It is set up in the "City panorama" Museum in the city of Kazan.

In contrast to the large layout of the city, the installation "Nowadays Kazan in virtual reality" takes up very little space, only a couple of square meters. Have a look. There is a metal structure similar to the periscope of the submarine fixed on the fenced area. In the periscope, we mounted virtual reality glasses Oculus Rift and also two handles with a button to it.

Leaning face to the mounted glasses, you see a virtual city of Kazan and some cues on how to control the periscope. The similarity with the periscope lies also in the fact that it can move up and down or around the axis of the structure at 320 degrees.

To convey the realism of the architecture, the programmers of United 3D Labs worked with the Unreal game engine.

Our modelers did not recreate the whole city in detail, they reproduced only the main attractions, while maintaining the layout of the city with its main roads, parks and of course the great Volga river.

If you point the periscope at a visually accentuated attraction, it gets highlighted for greater effect. By clicking on the button located on the handle of the periscope, a window with infographics pops up. Each location has its own theme, for example, by clicking on the Kazan Kremlin, the visitor learns about the city's population in general and the number of residents of each urban area. Also, there is an extra interesting fact in each topic.