Client: Diocese of Birmingham
Celebrating Discipleship is an online, immersive contemplative art experience created for the Diocese of Birmingham, using 360° vista photography captured within a working church building to invite visitors — wherever they are — into a prayerful and meditative digital experience.
Users move through the experience at their own pace, guided not by information panels but by images that ask to be sat with. Prompts are available to stimulate reflection and prayer, and the opportunity to contribute to a ‘discipleship story wall’ via an embedded Padlet interface.
The 360° format was chosen deliberately over conventional photography, and matters even more given the experience lives entirely online. A vista image has no single focal point to look at and look away from — dragged, tilted, and explored on screen, it surrounds the viewer’s attention rather than simply being looked at, giving a physically distant visitor something closer to presence than a static photograph could.
- Capture format: 360° vista photography, tripod-mounted, shot across multiple times of day and liturgical moments to capture the building’s full emotional register, then stitched and optimised for web-based panoramic playback
- Access: Fully browser-based, requiring no app download — visitors navigate directly to the experience online; a VR-optimised mode is available for headset users (e.g. Meta Quest, mobile VR) for full stereoscopic immersion of the same five images
- Interactivity: Deliberately restrained and browser-native — cursor/touch-based gesture responses, simple sliders, and lightweight text input.
- Pacing: No enforced timer or forward-only navigation; visitors can return to any of the five stations at any point, or leave the experience open in a tab as a quiet ambient companion
- Embeddable: The virtual room can be embedded on any website or LMS