In the summer of 2005 Natalie Kononenko and Peter Holloway spent a month conducting research in Central Ukraine. There were two major objectives: to collect information on weddings and funerals, and to make Virtual Reality (VR) tours of village houses and churches.

They took with them new equipment which had been obtained with funds from the University of Alberta. This included: a small digital sound recorder, new cameras, and a parabolic mirror for making panoramic photographs. This latter piece of equipment allows VR tours of buildings to be made by photography, not, as was done for the "Latysh Farm" and the "House of Baba Sanka" by generating the objects on the computer. This piece of new equipment was used to make VR tours of four village churches, four village houses, and, for comparison, an apartment in Kyiv.

Before you see these VR tours, here is an overview of the procedure used to document a room, this is to encourage others to use it (this type of procedure is used by realtors for selling houses in North America and elsewhere).

The parabolic mirror mounts on top of the camera, it allows a full picture of the room to be made (360 degrees horizontal, 115 degrees vertical).

The circular photograph obtained is very distorted, but computer software converts this into a panorama.

Other software then generates a VR movie (viewable with QuickTime).

In July, 2005 Kononenko and Holloway spent one week in Ploske and one week in Iavorivka. From these centers many expeditions were made to other villages, particularly Dobranychivka and Velykyi Khutir,

The locations of these villages are shown on the maps.

Also, thanks to Google Earth, "aerial" views of these villages (as "seen" from 18,000 feet") are shown.

Each of these villages has a church. The priest was interviewed in each village and permission was obtained to photograph the church.

These are small villages:

Ploske 1037 people.
Dobranychivka 374 people. The church was once an old school.
Iavorivka 750 people. This is a 200 year-old church made into a granary by the Soviets.
Velyki Khutir 2,500 people.

In each church, digital photographs were made with the panorama mirror and photographs were taken of the individual icons in the church. These were all combined into a VR movie. These movies are not "movies" in the classical sense. They do not "move" in a linear fashion when viewed. Instead, they allow the viewer to "move" their eyes where they want them to. In each room you can "look around" by moving the mouse while holding the left mouse button down. When the cursor changes from a "circle with a dot" (O) to an arrow (^) you can move to another scene by clicking the left mouse button. This "other scene" can be another room or an enlarged picture of an icon, etc.

We also made, smaller, VR tours of several houses in these villages. Previously, VR tours of "computer generated" houses in Iavorivka and Velykyi Khutir were made. On this expedition, the following houses were photographed, to show the different types.

Ploske: Kompanets house. A classic two-room house. This is a very old layout.
Perepechai house. A two-room house, with a lovely garden. More modern.
Litovka house. A bigger house with five rooms. This is a typical contemporary layout for this region.
Iavorivka Kapas house. A large house of a very prosperous village farmer.
Kyiv Kapas apartment. A modern three-room apartment in an urban center, Kyiv.

Some of these VR movies are quite large, hence a medium resolution and a low resolution version are listed on the next page.