Inside the Project Mapping 1000+ Chettinad Houses Using VR, Sensors & Community Stories

On a still, sun-washed afternoon in Tamil Nadu’s Chettinad region, the light falls differently. It bounces off Belgian stained glass, filters through Athangudi tiles (traditional handmade floor tiles) in shades of turmeric and sea green, and moves across pillared verandas built with Burmese teak.

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Down narrow lanes lined with 100-year-old mansions, dust swirls around crumbling facades as if trying to keep these houses breathing for one more day.

It is here, among decaying courtyards, abandoned wedding halls, and silent streets, that a team from Bengaluru’s Christ University is steadily building one of India’s most ambitious digital heritage repositories.

They are racing against time, armed with 360° cameras, microphones, scanners, and sketchbooks. Their aim is not to restore these grand homes, but to preserve the knowledge locked inside them before it disappears forever.

Over two years, they have recorded 1,042 heritage houses, collected 600 survey responses, conducted spatial and thermal studies, mapped water systems, and digitally captured 360-degree walkthroughs. Every visit helps them understand a culture whose architectural brilliance is at serious risk of fading.

The project, funded by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) and running from April 2024 to March 2026, brings together architecture, computer science, and media studies in a rare multidisciplinary effort.

Beyond the facades: A living system of home and community

The common perception of Chettinad often begins and ends with its sprawling, ornate mansions. Dr Balakrishnan C, project co-ordinator and associate professor in the department of computer science at Christ University, explains how much wider the reality is.“This particular Chettinad is not a single place. It is a collection of 73 villages. So collectively, they call it Chettinad.” The project’s scope is as vast as the region itself.

“The architecture here is truly unique,” he adds. “These buildings were designed with eco-friendly features and sustainable practices long before such terms even existed. A century ago, they already understood how to build in harmony with the environment.”

High roofs, clever cross-ventilation systems, and the use of local, sustainable materials, from lime mortar to egg whites, allowed these structures to stay cool and comfortable long before air conditioners existed. These choices reveal how deeply the builders understood their climate and how thoughtfully they responded to it.

The same awareness shaped the way the Chettiars sourced materials from other parts of the world. Famed as global traders, they brought home Burma teak, Italian marble, and Belgian stained glass. As Balakrishnan explains, they did so with a distinct philosophy. “They were not looking to adopt the foreign culture. They would often blend that material with the local culture.”

The research also looks at why such vast houses were built in the first place. The team uncovered a socio-economic reason that runs through many of these homes.

“Most of the men would be away, travelling across the world for trade and money lending,” Balakrishnan says. “They rarely visited home. The houses were built on such a large scale to host functions and gatherings, while it was mostly the women of the family who lived there and ran the household.”

Instead of simply documenting the decay, the team set out to capture the underlying intelligence of Chettinad’s built environment. They wanted to understand how structures breathed, how courtyards regulated temperature, how streets held water, and how craft sustained livelihoods. To do this, they needed more than architectural drawings.

They needed to digitally experience Chettinad. This gave form to their project titled ‘Digitalising Chettinad Architectural and Cultural Heritage in Tamil Nadu for Sustainable Knowledge Management: An Empirical Analysis’.

Stepping into a mansion through virtual reality

Walking into a Chettinad mansion is like stepping inside its own microclimate. The acoustics shift, the air cools, and silence turns layered. The team wanted people sitting far away to sense that change too.

This is where Balakrishnan and the media studies team, including research assistant Ajith Paul, build a bridge to the future. They are using a Ricoh Theta camera to capture 360-degree visuals of the heritage houses, and are embedding 3D spatial audio to create an immersive virtual reality (VR) experience.

Ajith, who is conducting experiments on this, explains the vision. “The idea is for the user to feel like they’re really there, exploring the space in a 360-degree view, guided by audio narration in a 3D format. It offers an experience that’s as close to the real location as possible.”

The goal is to study how this immersive technology enhances cultural understanding and retention compared to traditional media. However, the digital capture comes with its own challenges.

“There are many challenges like accessibility to the specific heritage mansions itself,” Ajith notes. “Many of them do not want us to capture or place sensors or use equipment inside these buildings.”

Reading heat, comfort and craft through data

While Ajith captured the sensory world, the architecture team, led by Dr Anitha Suseelan, dug into the bones of Chettinad.

The department undertook a massive ground-level documentation effort involving over 120 students. They began with manual measurements and drawings, then digitised them into CAD and advanced Revit models. The work stretches far beyond basic documentation.

“The hypothesis is that they perform beautifully well in thermal performances,” Dr Suseelan explains. To prove this empirically, the team, with the help of the computer science department, has installed sensors inside selected houses to measure temperature, humidity and environmental conditions.

“The data will be taken, and the simulation will take care of integrating this data onto the drawings and the 3D modelling.” This will help the team show, with actual data, how these traditional designs keep the houses cool without any mechanical systems.

They are also studying unique materials such as the famed Athangudi tiles. “The Athangudi tile is one of the best tiles you can find out there because no thermal energy is used for its curing. It's sun-dried. And it lasts for hundreds of years together,” Dr Suseelan adds.

As they examined these materials and techniques, the team realised that some of the most revealing insights lay beyond the walls of the houses.

A forgotten water network hidden in backyards

Chettinad has always been dry, surviving on scarce and seasonal rain. Its people developed a thoughtful, decentralised solution, which the team uncovered while studying Ponnamaravathi town.

“We find that a multitude of houses sit in the town, and there is a way in which the water is allowed to flow through the backyards,” Dr Suseelan describes. “Very interestingly, these small private properties collectively create a whole wetland system within the town.”

This system of channels and tanks, designed to slow and conserve every drop of rainwater in the arid region, is now under threat. “Due to the lack of research, many of these systems are deteriorating,” she adds.

The modern, centralised water supply network has made the indigenous system less used. “The earlier one was more community-driven, whereas the other one is more state-driven. You wait for the state to come in, whereas in the earlier one, people knew how to manage their problems.”

Songs, stories and saris that carry memory

Architecture is only one part of the project. The team also documents rituals, music, and folklore — the threads that give form to Chettinad’s identity.

“When we talk about Chettinad, we only think of the mansions,” says research consultant Dr Vishnu Prakash. “But there is more to it. We are trying to bring out all the other intangible aspects.”

With this in mind, the team stayed in villages, spoke to residents, recorded songs and ceremonies, and traced how stories were told in different courtyards. They also assisted local artisans in securing Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) for kandangi cotton saris (traditional Chettinad cotton saris), which use eco-friendly dyes.

Building a public archive that anyone can walk into

The project, slated for completion in March 2026, will culminate in a public website, a documentary, and exhibitions. Its true success lies in its potential to change the conversation around heritage conservation in India.

As the team looks ahead, Balakrishnan identifies a key gap in the current ecosystem. “The accessibility of the particular resources is very low. Even though the people are digitalising, everything is in the form of research reports or PhD theses, it's not made accessible to the public.”

The vision is for the public to walk into a Chettinad home without needing to step into one physically, a crucial step given that many original structures are ageing and may change significantly over the coming years.

To an outsider, these mansions may look like relics of wealth. To Chettinad, they are living archives of migration, trade, women’s labour, ecological intelligence, and culturally coded design.

Somewhere in the middle of a still village lane, as a 360-degree camera captures the echo of footsteps inside a fading veranda, you realise what is at stake. This documentation becomes an act of remembering, carried out before forgetting becomes inevitable.

All images courtesy Ajith Paul