Sensitive landscapes: immersive virtual tools

In the face of the tendency to prioritise intellectual, historical and artistic knowledge of heritage, cultural landscapes require us to re-focus our attention on exploring them as an experiential, sensory and corporeal phenomenon. From this perspective, we are able to reformulate approaches to its significance and value.

This need to pay attention to sensitive factors in cultural landscapes stems from their very nature, and the Spanish National Plan for Cultural Landscape (PNPC) highlights that every study must take four main aspects into consideration: the spatial dimension, the time dimension, multi-sensory perception and social interpretation. Cultural landscapes are therefore, by definition, an item of heritage in which individuals’ immersion and engagement with this cultural asset takes on a key role. For the first time, factors such as the experience, perception or significance of the built environment are becoming vitally important.

The project’s methodology is based on the latest innovations in representation methods used in landscape architecture, merged with human ecology and human geography approaches. It provides an additional approach to the way in which professionals confront a cultural heritage study, as it adds the subject’s perspective of dynamic immersion and phenomenological evaluation to standard Cartesian tools, such as maps and cross-sections.