Christoph Falkn­er and Thomas Grasl are part of  the project team  at the Vien­na Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy work­ing on the VIPA project, a transna­tion­al research project sup­port­ed by the Euro­pean Com­mu­ni­ty.

The objec­tive is the devel­op­ment of a transna­tion­al vir­tu­al cam­pus con­tain­ing an e‑learning and research plat­form for Euro­pean archi­tec­ture uni­ver­si­ties in the field of Vir­tu­al Space Design. Vir­tu­al spaces have also become a major eco­nom­i­cal growth fac­tor in many con­texts. Present­ly spa­tial con­cepts are dom­i­nant in the enter­tain­ment indus­try, but also oth­er areas of life are redesigned through aug­ment­ed real­i­ty and vir­tu­al real­i­ty concepts.
As a con­se­quence this means that the design of expe­ri­en­tial rooms is no longer restrict­ed to con­struc­tion process­es of the build­ing indus­try. New oppor­tu­ni­ties for work and employ­ment for the aes­thet­i­cal and con­cep­tion­al design of these vir­tu­al rooms will open up for archi­tects, whose major com­pe­tence is in the design of rooms and space based social interactions.Therefore, the objec­tive of the project is to devel­op cur­ric­u­lar tools, which expand and enhance the edu­ca­tion in the field of archi­tec­ture in this sense.