The Vinery – Virtual Reality Architecture – Competition

The vinery was a competition hosted by Ronen Bekerman and Epic Games to stresstest the much acclaimed Unreal Engine for Arch Viz purposes. Our scene can be freely explored and fully supports VR devices.

Conception:

To keep „visitors“ interested it became early on clear that the concept had to be out of the norm. So we decided to move the vinery setting into an unexpected environment. An icelandic setting with a strong volcanic touch delivers the right counterpiece to our architecture. Additionally the vast landscape allowed us to make use of the impressive terraformuing tools of the unreal engine.

Architecturally we decided to have a austere vernacular architecture interact with a angular modern architecture. The rural architecture was heavily influenced by famous architect Valerio Olgiati, one of the key representatives of swiss minimalism. This also lead to various anonymous architectural references. We blended the austere architecture of the ticino alpine villages, japanese simplicity with the chalked materials of greek villages.

The architecture set amidst the vast nordic landscape

For the modern architectural pieces we opted for a style that rather might be found in LA-architects as Morphosis or Eric Owen Moss. Both architectural worlds have their unique strong materiality and contrasting colorscheme to improve readibility and strengthen the experience.

Unreal offers the unique possibility to set up massive environments which can be explored freely; simultaneously detailed interiors with many accessories can be realised – which enables experiences of great depth.

The Unreal Engine proved again to be a very powerful tool to work with allowing us to create the looks that we desired.

To learn more about our conceptual approach, please visit our PDF: Vinery – Concept and Approach.

It was our desire to create a strong desire to explore the majestic landscape

The minimalistic interior design of one guestroom featuring a japanese zen-garden

Workflow:

Creating an interactive virtaul reality architecture experience requires a different approach. The viewer is free to move which requires a different planning a compelling experience. Our team started with rough blocking of the basic volumes to build up a main thread of experience. Once the trail is set our team then could start to detail the spaces visited.

Unreal offers the unique possibility to set up massive environments which can be explored freely; simultaneously detailed interiors with many accessories can be realised – which enables experiences of great depth.

As a final exercise we were demonstrating that compelling imagery in high resolution might be generated inside VR. The same goes for offline animations, which can be generated within very short times.

We hope that through this experience we allow our friends and clients to get a better insight into todays VR – possibilities.

The riverbed underneath the vinery

A low sunset in one of the adjacent valleys

The dining and common room