Moment of Battle

History

The Battle of Lützen (6 November 1632) was one of the most important battles of the Thirty Years' War, which began with the Second Defenestration of Prague in 1618 and ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The battle was a Protestant victory, but cost the life of one of the most important leaders of the Protestant alliance, the Swedish King Gustav II Adolf, which caused the Protestant campaign to lose direction. The battle was characterized by fog, which lay heavy over the fields of Saxony that morning. The phrase "Lützendimma" (Lützen fog) is still used in the Swedish language in order to describe particularly heavy fog. [1]
In August 2011 archaeologists made a sensational discovery. They found a mass grave with 47 well preserved skeletons. Block excavation was used to find out more about the soldiers, how they died and lived.

Realization

For 2018 the Town Lützen is planning a new Museum where visitors can find more information about the battle in 1632. The museum came to our university and asked for some exhibition ideas, which we used as a subject for the semester and after a while we came up with the idea to visualize the battle scene in a unique and special way. We wanted the visitors to feel the intense atmosphere during this battle but simultaneously preserve the right distance and aesthetics. The final idea was to create a frozen battle scene which gave us freedom to pose the soldiers in a proper way and prevent motion thickness.

We developed the scene using the HTC Vive and Unity. Despite the frozen Movement of the soldiers we achieved a convincing dynamism by adding moving particles and billow fog to the scene as well as battle sounds and battle cries.