One of the sensitive issues that we dealt with was on how to present the history of the city in the model.

Taking into consideration that there is not one historical narrative but several, the first thing we had to decide was how to show the passage of time.

Should we choose historic places?

Some places have different historic value to some populations and not to others.

Our model designer suggested making a “rain of dates” relevant to the different communities.

But which communities should we address?

Nor the Christian, the Jewish or the Muslim people living in Jerusalem are unified groups.

Finally we agreed on several dates that can be interpreted differently by different communities: some would consider the year 1948 as a joyful year and others, as a painful one.

Acknowledging that the choice of the 20 dates is political, we decided to open the personal interpretation of the events by translating each one to the different calendars (the Gregorian, the Jewish and the Hegira calendar).

These are the dates that we finally chose.

In developing the user interface between the visitor and the VR (Virtual Reality) program we had to take some aspects into consideration.

The VR program (client) was originally developed to be used on a PC/Mac using the usual input devices – keyboard and mouse.

- Moving the mouse forward and backward tilts the head of the avatar up and down.

- Moving the mouse left and right tilts the body (and the head moving with the body, as if it is "welded" to it) left and right.

- Pressing the Up and Down keys on the keyboard makes the avatar walk forward or backwards.

- Pressing the Right or Left keys on the keyboard makes the avatar slide left or right.

- Clicking the left mouse button activate objects that the mouse cursor points to.

- Pressing the space button on the keyboard makes the avatar jump.

Since we want to give the visitors a richer experience, we had to find ways to emulate the functions of the mouse and keyboard in different electronic devices and decide on what inputs are more important or less important for our specific VR environment.

We have decided to give priority to the mouse, up and down keys, mouse button and the space key.

In the following design you can see a trackball to the right of the visitor that emulates the mouse.



To the left of the visitors is a "barrel" that emulates the up and down keyboard buttons. Rolling the barrel forward or backward makes the avatar move accordingly.



The other two buttons emulate the mouse button for activating and the keyboard button for jumping.

There are three main populations in Jerusalem: one third is Ultraorthodox Jewish population, one third is Palestinian (secular and religious, Christian and Muslim) and one third is religious and secular Jewish population.

Generally these groups live in different parts of the city, but there are also some more or less mixed population neighborhoods. We decided to take one street, Jaffa rd., to show the neighborhoods of the two sides of the street. But we also wanted to show the atmosphere of this multicultural city: so we asked young people to talk about living in Jerusalem.

In order to highlight the religion in Jerusalem expressed also in religious turism, we made 3 different maps to include MUST-SEE places for the different populations, including one map with places from different population. In these ways we hope to show the complexity and intertwined environment that the city offers.

Must-See places in Jerusalem

Attractions for all

Old city wall Ramparts Walk
View Mt Olives
Bloomfield Science Museum Jerusalem

Jewish Places

In the Old City
- The Western Wall
- The Jewish quarter
- Huvra Synogogue

Outside the Old City
- The City of David
- King David's Tomb
- Mount Zion
- Hezekiah’s Tunnel

Western City
- The Great Synagogue
- Israel Museum

Muslim Places

In the Old City
- Al-Aqsa Mosque
- Qubbat Al-Sakhra (Dome of the Rock)
- Damascus Gate
- Arab Market
- Muslim Quarter

Outside the Old City
- American Colony
- View from Jabel Mukaber
- Silwan

Western City
- Museum of Islamic Art

Christian Places

In the Old City
- Via Dolorosa
- Church of the Holy Sepulcher
- Lutheran Church of the Redeemer,
- Christian Quarter

Outside the Old City
- Church of Pater Noster
- The Garden of Gethsemane
- Notre Dame

Ein Kerem
- Visitation church
- Virgin Mary Spring

We want to share some of the interesting aspects of this project from the My ideal Jerusalem team.

During January we conducted focus groups with secular and religious, children and grown-ups, Palestinian and Israeli people living in Jerusalem. As a result we came up with some core issues raised by the different groups:

• housing


• culture


• history


• education


• environment


• religion


• employment


• meeting places

These issues were important to the citizens of Jerusalem as they are to other people living in other cities. But there were also some colliding issues in the way the ideal city was imagined, one vision cancelling the other. The question was how to translate human dreams and tensions to the physical model.

Lila Chitayat, our designer, and her team came up with a very interesting concept of putting together different functions in order to highlight the similarities in spite of the differences. For example, taking the meeting places/markets, the idea was to build the model and invite the avatars to enter one market joint place through the different markets in the city and being able to go from one market to the other. We invite you to look at the initial proposal.



Please let us know what you think.