Geh mit Hoelderlin: VR Poetry Experience

Overview

This project reinterprets the poetry of Friedrich Hoelderlin as an interactive VR experience. Developed in Unreal Engine 5, it places visitors inside a stylized forest landscape where poetry can be explored through movement, sound, light, and interaction. The aim was to make Hoelderlin's imagery more accessible by translating selected poetic lines into an immersive audiovisual environment.

Created within the interdisciplinary university module "Von Hoelderlin bis Nibelungen: VR, AR und AI-Experimente," the project began in a broader XR context, including early AR-related ideas. The final realized and exhibited outcome, however, focused on the VR experience presented on Meta Quest 3.

My Contribution

I designed and implemented the VR environment in Unreal Engine 5, including terrain building, scene composition, object placement, interaction logic, and usability adjustments for VR. I also developed the interaction flow that connects virtual objects with poetic lines and their corresponding recitation audio, and tested the experience directly on Meta Quest 3.

Process and Challenges

Environment Design: The visual world was built around a stylized forest environment that matched the poetic atmosphere I wanted to create. I sculpted the landscape, arranged natural assets, and placed interactive elements such as flowers, mushrooms, and stones throughout the scene.
Poetry and Audio Interaction: Each interactive object was linked to a specific line of poetry and its corresponding recitation audio. When visitors approached or activated an object, a visual highlight was triggered, the poetic line appeared, and the spoken recitation became part of the experience.
VR Adaptation: After an early desktop prototype, I adapted the interaction design for VR and replaced the original click-based logic with a distance-based shooting interaction, allowing visitors to activate objects more precisely in the headset.
Readability and Immersion: To keep the poem text readable in VR, I reworked the widget presentation with a Stereo Layer workflow. I also refined lighting, post-processing, and spatial audio so that the text remained legible without losing the atmosphere of the scene.

Outcome

The final result is a VR poetry experience that transforms literary text into an explorable spatial environment. Instead of encountering Hoelderlin only on the page, visitors experience selected lines through movement, sound, light, and interaction in virtual space. The project was presented during the Hochschultage at HfK Bremen.

Geh mit Hoelderlin: VR Poetry Experience

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Overview

My Contribution

Process and Challenges

Outcome

Video