A visit to the Dresden Frauenkirche

Abstract

The Frauenkirche was destroyed when Dresden was bombed by the Allied forces February 13-14, 1945. The church is now being reconstructed in an effort led by the Foundation for the Reconstruction of the Frauenkirche. The VRDECK software package developed at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center was used to view and walk through a model created from the original church plans. A Polhemus tracker and a custom-built joystick using the Logitech 3D mouse were used for six-degree-of-freedom input to the application. The interactive fly-through of the church is in an immersive environment. One can navigate around the model wearing a head-mounted display, sitting in front of a standard monitor, looking at a stereo image produced on a stereo monitor, or standing before a projection screen displaying a stereo image of the scene. The system was developed for and exhibited at the IBM booth in the CeBIT fair in Hannover, Germany in March 1994 with funding from IBM Germany.