Walk the Sanctum: Live 360° Tour + Evaluation Workflow for Chemmanthatta Mahadeva Temple Murals

Virtual heritage workflows for sacred sites often lack transparency in capture, authoring, ethical considerations, and user evaluation. This poster and live demo presents a reproducible pipeline for creating and assessing 360° virtual tours of Kerala temple murals, demonstrated through the Chemmanthatta Mahadeva Temple, Thrissur — a living Hindu temple whose walls carry Kerala’s distinctive tradition of narrative mural painting. With Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) Thrissur Circle sanction obtained prior to all capture, and negotiated constraints governing camera placement, restricted angles, and limited publication rights over sanctum imagery, panoramas were captured across mural panels, authored into an interactive tour using Storyline 360, and augmented with a bilingual (English and Malayalam) embedded survey on aura, sacredness, authenticity, and cultural presence. Attendees can experience the live prototype, navigating the temple’s spatial grammar — from entrance to sanctum sanctorum following the logic of prada kṣiṇa — while testing the evaluation instrument firsthand.

Literature Context

This work extends Walter Benjamin’s aura critique of digital reproduction’s detachment from ritual context through virtual heritage scholarship examining 360° environments’ capacity for “virtual presence” (Benjamin, 2001; Bakker, 2018; Galeazzi et al., 2018). Diana Eck’s account of darśan — the relational, visually constituted encounter between devotee and divine image — provides a culturally specific framework for what is at stake when a temple’s visual field is transposed into a screen-based environment (Eck, 1996). Meyer’s concept of sensational forms further grounds the project’s attention to medium, device, and cultural background as determinants of devotional experience (Meyer, 2009, 2020). VR heritage studies emphasise workflow transparency for reproducibility, particularly the ethical capture and documentation of sacred content (Kenderdine & Yip, 2018; Zhang & Du, 2025). This work addresses gaps by operationalizing aura, sacredness, and authenticity as measurable constructs within a reusable and documented pipeline.

Workflow Pipeline (5 documented stages)

(1) Ethical Capture: ASI-sanctioned 360° image capture of rituals, sightlines (sanctum sanctorum, deepasthambham, balipeetham), and documented limitations on image capture and publication with community permission for publication of devotional images. (2) Contextual Authoring: Hotspot navigation and iconographic annotations within Storyline 360 tour that are bilingual (English & Malayalam) and preserve temple pathways with documentation for transfer to open source alternatives. (3) Experimental Design: Tour evaluation embedded survey with 10 Likert items over four culturally relevant categories: spatial sacredness, authenticity, cultural presence, and affective engagement; plus open-ended response questions; pre-tour questionnaire for demographic information (device used, tech savviness, religion/culture, temple visitation history). (4) Tour Deployment and Participant Recruitment: Web-based tour hosted online using snowball sampling approach to recruit participants (ages 25-65) who have and have not studied Kerala mural paintings; n=20 so far; targeting n=100. (5) Data Analysis and Archival Plan: Descriptive stats exported in CSV format; manual thematic coding in; all materials archived on GitHub CC-BY-NC with note on sacred content use.

Initial Results (n=20, study ongoing)

Results to date indicate that spatial continuity, minimally processed images, and contextual notations enhance the perceived cultural presence and sacredness, while authenticity is seen similarly among different cultures. Those participants who were familiar with the Kerala temple tradition indicated high cultural presence and sacredness; ratings for authenticity differed less between groups, meaning that authenticity is perceived more consistently than sacredness.

Demo Features

Tour the temple interiors from its entrance all the way to the sanctum, experience the bilingual murals via contextual pop-up windows, and fill in the embedded questionnaire. The demo runs within the browser without installation necessary and is fully mobile-enabled. Visitors’ data are entered into the live data set on a per-cultural background and per-device basis. Quotes from users in English and Malayalam.

Reproducibility Package

Storyline 360 source files and panoramas; bilingual survey instrument (Google Forms); pre-tour demographic survey; and raw data schematics. Under CC-BY-NC license; sacred context use note provided. Workflow information describes ASI permission procedures, limitations on capture, and guidance for other sacred heritage locations and management regimes.

Beyond This Temple

The workflow may be transferred by means of the following three factors which can be generalized to apply in any sacred heritage context: permission framework (who controls access, and under what restrictions?), ritual grammar (what spatial rules define the original view?) and cultural value language (which terms, such as ‘sacredness’ and darśan, have meaning within the culture?). Further applications involve head mounted display tests and multiple temples in Kerala’s mural heritage.