Auzoux VR * 2025
Salón de Actos, Edificio Dioscórides, Universidad de Salamanca (Salamanca, Spain)
Auzoux VR – An Interactive Encounter with 19th-Century Botany is an immersive virtual reality experience that reinterprets and activates the University of Salamanca’s (USAL) scientific heritage through a contemporary, public-facing format. Created within SciCommXR, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie European project led by António Baía Reis at the CaUSAL (Academic Culture, Heritage and Social Memory) research group, the experience invites audiences to rediscover a remarkable collection of 19th-century botanical teaching models by French physician and naturalist Louis Auzoux, preserved by the Department of Botany and Plant Physiology (USAL). Conceived originally as pedagogical tools, these objects are presented not only for their scientific value but also for their artistic, historical, and aesthetic richness, reframed through immersive media as living cultural artifacts rather than static museum pieces.
At the core of the project is a simple but powerful gesture: making the unapproachable approachable. In VR (and also in a desktop version), users can explore five Auzoux models inside an interactive digital environment where each specimen becomes visible at a level of proximity and detail that traditional physical display rarely allows. Visitors can move around the models, observe their structures closely, and engage with them as three-dimensional knowledge objects, strengthening understanding of their original didactic function and reconnecting contemporary audiences with the history of science education. In this sense, Auzoux VR operates simultaneously as heritage communication, experiential learning, and immersive storytelling, blending scientific rigor with a sensorial, carefully designed narrative and aesthetic layer.
The work is explicitly interdisciplinary, combining science, art, history, conservation, and immersive design through a collaboration that bridges research groups and institutions: alongside CaUSAL and USAL’s Botany department, the project involves the USAL Network of Scientific Collections and the GIR IMPACT group at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Painting and Conservation-Restoration), reinforcing a model of heritage innovation grounded in joint expertise. The project’s public launch (23 October 2025, Dioscórides Building, USAL) was designed not only as a presentation but as an open conversation, framing Auzoux VR as part of a broader strategy to connect university heritage with society through XR-based cultural innovation and new paradigms for public communication of science.
FULL EXPERIENCE:
https://botanicafisiologiavegetal.usal.es/auzouxvr/
Creative direction and science communication were led by António Baía Reis; scientific direction by Luis Delgado Sánchez and José Sánchez Sánchez (USAL); digitization, 3D and conservation by Emanuel Sterp Moga (UCM); 3D art and immersive development by José Villot Guisán (Kluge Interactive); and scientific illustration by David Martín Rubio. Voice acting includes António Baía Reis, Carmen López San Segundo, and Violeta Aparicio de Miguel, reinforcing the project’s commitment to bridging scholarship, interpretation, and public engagement.
MEDIA:
https://www.salamanca24horas.com/universidad/botanica-siglo-xix-cobra-vida_1_2885311.html