With the official MAINZ app—the city of Mainz’s “digital showcase”—interested visitors will soon be able to immerse themselves in “medieval Mainz” and explore the areas around St. Martin’s Cathedral —Marktplatz, Liebfrauenplatz, Leichhof, and what is now Schöfferstraße—digitally.
Several 3D reconstructions from the periods around 800 and 1250 AD use virtual reality to illustrate what Mainz might have looked like in the distant past. This allows visitors to trace the changes Mainz underwent during the Middle Ages between 800 and around 1250: The city doubled in size. While residential buildings were initially more like huts, more and more stone houses and multi-story half-timbered structures were added later. Old churches were rebuilt, and new ones were added. The old thoroughfares and large squares, as well as the banks of the Rhine with their landing stages and storage areas for goods, remained constant throughout these historical periods.
The photorealistic 360° visualizations were created based on digital 3D reconstructions developed at the AI MAINZ – Architecture Institute at Mainz University of Applied Sciences in cooperation with the General Directorate for Cultural Heritage for the 2020 state exhibition “Emperors and the Pillars of Their Power.”
The results of the project “Mainz – Worms – Speyer. Three medieval cities in the heart of Europe, presented as Linked Data, will be showcased to a broad audience beyond the state exhibition in a “Digital Urban History Lab” (planned opening: May 2021) developed in collaboration with the Department of Design at Mainz University of Applied Sciences. In an exciting display of digital 3D-printed models of the medieval cities on a scale of 1:1000, interactive access to this knowledge will be demonstrated via touchscreen controls, with projections onto models of the city of Mainz as it appeared around 800 and 1250. The integration of the interactive visualization from the Mainz App into the aforementioned locations around Mainz Cathedral is currently being planned.
The Mainz App, developed by mainzplus CITYMARKETING GmbH and Tourismusfonds Mainz e.V., is available online at www.mainz-app.de and in the app stores.
Photos: AI MAINZ – Architecture Institute of Mainz University of Applied Sciences
