The name, Church Art of Sweden, caught my attention. To be honest, I’ve never much thought about the church history of Sweden in general, yet here is an app celebrating its art.
About the Experience
This experience begins in a museum. You can walk around to see various statues and framed paintings. There are around fifteen items on display along a few walls.
The stand-out feature is a set of five tables topped with miniature landscapes (shown in the image below). Each table displays a church and its immediate surroundings, including trees, gravestones, paths, and fences. You can walk around the table to look at the church from all angles to get a great feel for the layout.
Once you’re ready to explore closer, you can shrink yourself down and enter the church yard. Now you can look around and see everything at full-size! Walk around the church, go inside, and explore the grounds.
Graphics
The museum interior is plain. All the art in the museum is captured within the range of “pretty good”—some pieces look excellent, while others don’t stand up to super-close scrutiny. Once you enter a tabletop church exhibit, the landscape around the church appears pretty low-quality. I suspect that the developers used the same tabletop landscape model for both views (from the museum and from within the landscape) to reduce their rendering workload, but of course this makes the close-up view look less crisp.
Once you go inside a tabletop church, the quality goes up. The developers did a good job of creating beautiful spaces. They clearly used high-quality photos to create the interior scenes. That said, they missed some photographic angles, so you’ll still see artifacts like floating blocks, gaps, and missing depth information. The developers restrict your movement in some places to attempt to hide the issues. Not that you can complain much, given the price!
Information
This isn’t a tour experience, but there’s some narration attached to callouts in the churches. The museum art pieces display panels with additional written information.
Inside the tabletop churches, you come across more callouts. Some are even illustrated to call attention to details around you.
In one of the churches, there are actually “nested” models showing the church structure at different periods. I’ve seen that done in historic churches of Europe and it was a neat detail to add here. Each one had its own callout to learn more.
Interactivity
This experience has little interactivity. You can activate information cards in the museum and, of course, jump between the museum and the tabletop churches. This level of interactivity works just fine in a simple museum experience like this one.
Future Potential
It would be great if the developers added more churches and artwork in the future. The product description from the developers implies that there could be future versions, but they don’t explicitly talk about their plans. In the museum, there are five churches on tables with one marked “coming soon.” Given the time since last update, I wouldn’t want to be too optimistic.
Summary
Pros
- Being able to walk around the church models in miniature is a great feature
- Nice selection of churches and statues
- Information cards offer extra details
Cons
- Scan quality of the church exteriors is fairly poor
- Scan quality of church interiors could be better (though better than exteriors)
This experience was such a great idea. I suspect it’s intended to get more people interested in visiting. I particularly love exploring old churches, so having several churches to explore in the same experience is really nice. I would have paid a few dollars for it—even better that’s free. No excuse not to try it out! It’s a shame there are some glitches here and there, but it’s still better than seeing flat pictures in a book. Learn about a different aspect of Sweden than you might have thought of before!
