Academics create ‘Assassin’s Creed’ shrine to murdered saint
Craig Simpson
THE medieval pilgrimage to Thomas Becket’s tomb will be digitally reconstructed like a video game, professors have revealed after unveiling a CGI shrine for the murdered saint.
Using virtual reality technology, visitors will be able to experience the journey to Canterbury made famous by Geoffrey Chaucer, and see the holy site as the poet would have seen it.
University of York professors developed a CGI image of the shrine erected after the Archbishop was martyred by Henry II’S knights, using contemporary sources and 21st-century technology to model the tomb.
They plan to use the same techniques to recreate the whole of medieval Canterbury and its cathedral, allowing visitors wearing virtual reality goggles to make a pilgrimage through the town as it looked in the 15th century. If funding is secured and the project of digitally recreating the holy site is successful, the University of York team hope to apply the technology to other places of cultural or religious pilgrimage.
“It’s a bit like ‘Assassin’s Creed: Becket’,” said Dr John Jenkins on the vision for virtual reality visits.
“You should feel like you could run into the cathedral and save him from the knights.”
Becket was murdered in 1170 and his shrine, destroyed during the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII, has been modelled in minute detail by the team at York to show visitors a digital image of the tomb whose appearance has long divided scholars.