Athangudi Palace VR
The Athangudi Palace Immersive Experience enables users to explore one of Chettinad’s significant heritage residences through interactive digital media. The platform presents the palace through 360° visuals, audio, and navigable heritage spaces, allowing users to observe its courtyards, interiors, carved wooden elements, handmade tiles, and architectural details.
Users can access the site through a browser-based walkthrough or enter the immersive VR version using a compatible headset. By bringing the palace into an accessible digital environment, the platform supports heritage education, remote exploration, and wider public appreciation of Chettinad architecture.
Saratha Vilas VR
The Saratha Vilas Virtual Walkthrough digitally recreates the spatial experience of this restored Chettinad mansion. Through panoramic navigation, users can move across its rooms, corridors, courtyards, architectural features, and heritage interiors while exploring the building remotely.
The platform provides two modes of access: an interactive browser-based walkthrough and an immersive VR experience. It demonstrates how 360° documentation and virtual-reality technologies can preserve the spatial character of a heritage building while making it accessible for education, research, interpretation, and cultural tourism.
Chettinad Heritage Explorer
The Chettinad Heritage Explorer is the project’s digital architectural repository, created to organise and provide public access to field data collected from Chettinad’s historic settlements. It currently brings together more than 1,082 heritage records from 12 villages across Sivaganga and Pudukkottai districts.
Each record presents available information on the building’s location, historic name, architectural style, typology, number of floors, estimated age, historical significance, ownership, present use, photographs, geographical coordinates, and Google Maps location. Users can explore the collection village-wise and district-wise, making the platform useful for researchers, architects, students, heritage professionals, communities, and the wider public.
The Explorer transforms extensive field documentation into an accessible digital knowledge resource that supports architectural research, heritage awareness, conservation planning, and long-term preservation.