New Zealand Virtual Debating Chamber

Through the use of Photogrammetry, 3D scanning and Virtual Reality, the Virtual Debating Chamber (VDC) experience provides a guided digital tour of the chamber. Visitors, students, scholars and researchers will be able to view the chamber up close and personal at any time.

From the product description

About the Experience

Another VR experience about the New Zealand parliament. Yes, you read that right. I feel like we can’t cover all of them, but we’ll do our best! All joking aside, there are surprisingly two different apps relating to NZ parliament, but since the other one was only released for the Oculus Go (not compatible with the Quest), it’s not something I’ve ever been able to try.

I grabbed this because it’s free and it sounded vaguely interesting. I’m always up for learning new things, especially at the right price, so I decided to install it. I’m glad I did! Not only is the photogrammetry very high-quality, but there are lots of callouts with additional context so you can learn a bit about New Zealand at the same time.

While focusing on the areas of the room, various items, and features of the architecture, you get narration, photos, and even relevant classic news reels. It really is a well-done production.

Graphics and Sound

For being a free educational experience, the graphics are quite nice. The room is an example of the grand architecture often seen in government buildings. Columns, arches, a gorgeous ceiling with colored glass panels, and general fanciness all around makes this a wonderful room to be in. Of course, it’s not how nice the real place is, but how faithful the experience is in VR. I haven’t been there for real, but I can say that they did a really good job of making it feel solid.

One of the things that is always a challenge with photogrammetry is how you handle thin lines. Anything that’s too thin either disappears or becomes an ugly blob that detracts. A great example here would be the microphones on each desk. These would have come through as a mess in the original scan, but they clearly went back and cleaned them up and replaced them with digitally modeled versions. They blend together and you can’t even tell!

It’s also nearly impossible to get every angle of a room with so many undersides of desks and chairs. There were a few glitches in spots like this, but you had to look for them. They didn’t detract.

Information Content

Wandering around an empty government building isn’t likely to be very informative, but thankfully, they did a great job of integrating useful information everywhere. All the (+) indicators bring up a photo, video, or sound clip along with spoken narration. Activating the spot makes a popup appear with the photo or video and a button beneath it to switch between the visual and the narrated text.

For the video and audio clips, there’s a separate play button, a scrubber bar, and the timecode. I really appreciate the controls since play/pause isn’t always available in these experiences and without a scrubber bar you have no control over jumping forward or backward.

The headphone indicators play a brief narration with no popup. I’m not sure why these were done without the text option.

Given the nature of New Zealand, I was very surprised by the lack of a Māori translation or even voice-over. I had understood that New Zealand was like Canada where everything produced by the government is dual language (English and French for Canada), but perhaps this is somehow not considered official. It seems like it would make it less useful for using as a tool in schools this way.

Navigation and Interactivity

There’s nothing to interact with. I had hoped I could pick up the golden scepter, simply called the Mace, that the Seargent-at-arms must bring to convene a session, but I could only look at it on display. In reality, if the house isn’t in session, it’s not in the room, but thankfully they included it in the modeling.

Navigation is pretty typical (thankfully). Press forward to choose a teleport location, use the thumbstick to snap-turn 90° either way. I really hate when developers feel the need to reinvent simple mechanisms like this. I had trouble with it working at times. It simply didn’t activate the “arc” to choose a destination, but that could have been my own issue or a bug.

Updates and Support

This title does not have ongoing content releases.

Summary

It’s a great way to learn more about a far-off place (sorry, kiwis!). Seeing the significance of the wall plaques and the history of New Zealand relating to suffrage and fighting in foreign wars was eye-opening. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys learning about other countries and cultures.

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