The Corning Museum of Glass Is Using VR to Recreate a Historic Drawing Room

During the late 18th century, Hugh Percy, 1st Duke of Northumberland, hired celebrated British architect Robert Adam to design a lavish glass drawing room for his London home. Flash forward to today, and this interior has become the central component of the Corning Museum of Glass's upcoming exhibition, "In Sparkling Company: Glass and Social Life in Britain During the 1700s," which opens in May. The drawing room, whose glass panels were acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum during the 1950s, will be on view in its entirety for the first time in 200 years, thanks to virtual reality technology.

By donning a VR headset, museum visitors will be able to explore the room almost exactly as it was, down to the tiniest details. To create this experience—the first such foray for the museum—the institution has partnered with Noho, a Dublin-based production company. “I don’t think we’ve seen another project come up that lends itself so perfectly to VR technology as the Northumberland room,” Mandy Kritzeck, the Corning Museum of Glass's digital media producer, explains to AD PRO. Recent advancement in the technology allows for more accurate renderings of reflective surfaces, like the plentiful mirrors and glass panels that define the glass drawing room. “Even two or three years ago, I don’t think you could do a mirrored room in VR—it would confuse the system," Kritzeck says.

In order to capture the room and its objects in 3D, Kritzeck, Christopher Maxwell, curator of European glass at the Corning Museum, and the Noho team traveled to the Victoria and Albert Museum to measure and photograph—from every possible angle—each of the room’s elements. They also visited the Syon House in London, another of Adam’s architectural masterpieces, to examine the original chimneypiece, reinstalled at Syon after the demolition of Northumberland House.

While many of the room's panels remain, other aspects of the room have been lost over time, leaving gaps in the understanding and preservation of the space. The team found the original furniture in storage, but in poor condition: The upholstery that had been put on during the 1820s had begun to peel away. However, this turned out to be an unexpected blessing. “Underneath was the original upholstery, which no one had seen before,” Maxwell says. “So we were able for the first time to recreate the upholstery for the room, which is very different from what generally has been imagined.”

Using photographs and dimensions, the production team essentially built each of the room’s elements in 3D. Tone and texture were then applied to each object, making them look like gilded wood, iron, or glass. Finally, all of the elements were combined in Unity, a real-time 3D development platform, to complete the virtual construction of the space.

The room boasts an incredible amount of detail: In addition to the glass panels, paintings of Greek deities decorate the walls, and fluted borders and gilt rosettes frame the panels of an ornate mahogany door. But even when an element repeats (as the rosettes do), the Noho team rendered each detail individually, to mimic the slight variations in the handcrafted originals. “It’s virtually crafting these objects,” Maxwell says. “Each carved detail, each gilded plaster detail is individually rendered so that it looks as if it’s been made by hand, as opposed to just someone hitting 'enter' on a keyboard and reproducing it a thousand times.”