Drawing on the photographic archive of Maryam Sahinyan (1911-1996) and Osep Minasoglu (1929-2013), Armenian photographers who lived in Istanbul at the time, the installation materializes an extinct space. The wall in the virtual studio that exhibits Sahinyan’s photos is transformed into a documentation of the raids and their aftermath in the physical space; by overlapping the layouts of the two spaces the project experiments with the transition from a virtual to physical experience.

September 1955 is a 8-minute virtual-reality documentary of the Istanbul Pogrom, a government-initiated organized attack on the minorities of Istanbul on September6-7, 1955. This interactive installation places the viewer in a reconstructed photography studio in the midst of the pogrom, allowing one to witness the events from the perspective of a local shop-owner.

The experience of the space induced by participating in the mundane activities of the photography studio aims to generate unique historical narratives that are reproduced and enacted by the viewer.

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MIT.nano, a new center for nanoscience and nanotechnology, has launched an advanced facility open to the entire community of faculty, researchers, partners, and students.

As part of the MIT.nano opening event, Virtual Experience Design Lab has created virtual and augmented reality experiences to showcase the laboratory spaces and clean rooms within MIT.nano, which were closed to the public and were not accessible during the event. The VR/AR experiences provided an opportunity to explore and to better understand how nanoscience and nanotechnology laboratories operate.

Hospital with one entrance and two exits is a virtual reality piece created from point-cloud data generated by a laser scan acquired at the Cerrahpaşa Hospital in Istanbul. The piece responds in real-time to viewer attention; interaction shapes the the virtual space itself. Moving through an operation room corridor–-with stretchers, surgical equipment, and the buzzing sound of fluorescent lights–-the viewer sees the hospital through machinic vision, through point clouds.

The hospital is a place where tactile and intimate knowledge of the human body is enhanced by advanced medical imaging technologies to diagnose and treat the human body. In this piece, the objects and buildings are in turn subjected to a similar examination. The point cloud data transforms the space and the observer in the space. The way the building appears, disappears, is transparent and at moments quite legible forms a fluctuating consciousness, a perception that is neither of the animate or the inanimate.

How can we use immersive technology to imagine the future of design education? Virtual Design Studio workshop explored novel sensory and material experiences enabled by virtual reality. The workshop aimed at developing formal design methods that are informed by sensory experiences and bodily interactions within immersive digital environments.

During this two-week workshop, we presented a multi-sensory design framework that included photorealistic immersive visualizations, digital lighting, and material design, and spatial sound design. Going beyond traditional representations, students imagined and created novel architectural experiences and narratives using cutting-edge virtual reality tools.