VESPACE

VESPACE is a collaboration between scholars in literature, history, performing arts, architecture, game studies, and computer science. Our goal is to develop a new way of writing cultural history for the digital age, using a computer-based, immersive, interactive simulation as the interface for developing and disseminating historical-cultural scholarship.

Would you like to… 

• Experience the VESPACE project?
• Explore scholarship related to VESPACE?
• Learn about the project history and collaborators in the VESPACE project?
• Contact VESPACE team members?

VESPACE was conceived as a virtual reality model of a restituted theatre space, whose architectural framework was developed by Paul François, PhD. 

Dr. François’ work allows user to explore a version of the space represented on a 3cm x 6cm image depicting the marionette theatre of Sieur Bienfait at the Saint-Germain Fair, painted on an eighteenth-century snuffbox that currently resides in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of New York.

The Unity video game engine was chosen for this modeling in order to make the experience both entertaining and informative for the widest possible public.

In order to create a virtual model that is useful for academic and scientific research, we must approach it with the same rigor in the selection and contextualization of sources as would be the case for a scholarly publication.

Explore the scholarship behind the development of the VESPACE project.

VESPACE is a project that brings together historians, literary scholars, architects, performers, and engineers around the study of the theatrical culture at the eighteenth-century Saint-Germain Fair in Paris.

Learn more about the VESPACE project and follow along the timeline of its development.