VESTA – Virtual Vineyard

Release Date: June 2017

The Virtual Vineyards project is exploring innovative approaches to providing viticulture and enology education to professionals through the use of virtual reality and web technologies.

Current prototypes allow learners to explore a virtual vineyard and participate in a number of interactive simulations, including the ability to prune grape vines and watch how the vines grow over time in different conditions, and interact with common vineyard equipment such as a sorting table (used to sort out unwanted materials gathered during harvest), destemmer machine (removes the stems from the grapes), and the basket press (used to squeeze the juice out of the grapes).

The project is funded by the National Science Foundation through the Viticulture Enology Science and Technology Alliance (VESTA).

Game Development Team:

Brian Winn: Principal Investigator

William Jeffery: Executive Producer – Project Manager

Ryan Chuang

Anya Kolesnichenko

Travis Nichols

Scott Holzknecht

Olivia Nalon

Kenny Wherry

Colleen Little

Jasmine Burks

Trever Daniels

Andrew Bonczyk

Jaime Winters

Mingshun Zhu

Colleen Little

Ryan Magliola

Austin Widmyer