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The Senate of Romania, which operates in the Palace of the Parliament (Casa Poporului), has put up for auction in SICAP a contract of 0.56 million lei for the purchase of virtual reality and augmented reality applications to present an area of the former Uranus district, demolished by Nicolae Ceaușsescu to make way for the current construction.
The two applications will work in the premises of the Romanian Senate within the Palace of the Parliament and the garden of the Romanian Senate. The AR application will use visitors’ mobile phones to render a fragment of the former Uranus district on the surface of the current Senate garden, and the VR application will be used through VR devices in the space designed for this purpose.
The AR application will present on mobile the reconstructed area of the neighborhood that corresponds to the current area of the Senate Gardens and partially includes Cazarmii, Seneca, Fenix, Miracolelor, Bagdad and fully Vitănești streets. According to the contracting authority, the use of this application will allow the visitor to see the architecture of the disappeared houses, the general visual and sound atmosphere and offer interactive elements structured according to a narrative thread to be proposed by the bidder. The duration of the journey is 10 minutes, and the number of interactions is 5-10 minutes.
“The specification describes the need to develop two applications, one of virtual reality and the other of augmented reality (AR), in order to highlight the lost heritage in the form of an area in the former Uranus district, the current garden of the Romanian Senate. The development of a complete solution is foreseen, covering the necessary hardware, software, arrangement, training, and other dependencies. The main purpose of the project is the development of an immersive environment conducive to rendering the historical and cultural context of Uranus in the most complete form possible…. the modularity of the visitor experience will allow different degrees of immersion depending on the time available to each. The first layer/level, the real one, is meant to attract attention and invite to the second level, but it stands on its own and is sufficient for a short visit. Level 2, the virtual, deepens the experience and seeks to bring the past into the present, not just evoke the past. It is complementary to the real arrangement, not in competition with it”, we read in the tender specifications.
Bids open on March 27.
The Uranus neighborhood in Bucharest was located in the area of Parcul Izvor, Casa Poporului, Casa Academiei and was demolished in the 80s to make room for Nicolae Ceaușescu’s grand dreams. The demolitions in the Uranus area were part of the Bucharest systematization plan, which began in the late 70s, after the 1977 earthquake. Nicolae Ceaușescu used this natural disaster to demolish many old buildings in Bucharest and create a new political-administrative center. Thus, the Uranus neighborhood was completely destroyed, many buildings of historical value, including 22 churches and the Brâncovenesc Hospital, newly renovated, founded in 1835 from the wealth of Safta Elisabeta Brâncoveanu, the wife of the grand ban Grigore Brâncoveanu.
