In early 2023 Bath Abbey opened a new discovery centre as part of their Footprint project. I developed several touch screen interactives for the new centre, the key one being a real-time 3D exploration of Bath Abbeys West Front, giving visitors an opportunity to view some of the architecture close up.

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The interactive uses a small full HD touch screen (about the size of an iPad), as a touchpad, and a large 4K monitor in portrait orientation to view the West Front. Using the touch screen, visitors can drag to 'fly' around the West Front on the large 4K screen, and search for specific locations to discover more about them.

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The West Front was recreated as a 3D photogrammetry model by Wessex Archaeology. Exploration of the West Front is gamified by arranging various architectural points of interest into groups of three. On locating each point of interest, visitors are rewarded with information and an animated illustration related to that point. When all three points have been located, the view reveals the entire West Front model, accompanied by short snippets of information about the key locations. Visitors can play again to get a different group of points to locate and learn about.

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Design and development of the game was mostly my responsibility, having been given a loose brief to fly around a 3D model and locate different areas. There are boundaries to the gameplay area. As the player approaches a boundary, the view transitions to greyscale and a vignette to indicate they can go no further. If the player lets go of the touchpad while in the air, the view starts to fall slowly as if caused by gravity, before bouncing off the ground and coming to a stop.

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I used HDRP, Cinemachine, Shader Graph and Visual Effect Graph to develop this interactive.