The Villa Forni Cerato Project brings together language learning, cultural interpretation, and immersive 3D media through the reconstruction of a Renaissance residence as a high-fidelity digital twin for teaching and research. Located in Montecchio Precalcino (Vicenza, Veneto), Villa Forni Cerato is included in the UNESCO World Heritage site “City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto.” Traditionally attributed to Andrea Palladio and associated with a 1562 sketch, the villa provides a historically resonant setting for situated language practice and guided literary pathways. A 2018 laser and photogrammetric survey supplied the base geometry for the model, while a 2025 conservative archaeological restoration updated key architectural elements, including windows, shutters, and the north-side balustrade. Working in parallel with these updates, two artists from the University of Florida’s Digital Worlds Institute—Jennifer Purington and Cody Davis—rebuilt the villa in Unreal Engine, calibrating materials, lighting, and real-world orientation to produce an accurate, stable environment suitable for repeated classroom use.

The reconstruction was developed in Unreal Engine 5.5, with architectural details and furnishings modeled in Autodesk Maya and textured through PBR workflows in Adobe Substance Painter. Human characters were created and animated with Reallusion Character Creator 5 and integrated into the environment as scene-aware “digital humans.” Conversational interaction is implemented through ConvAI, enabling multilingual, real-time dialogue by text and voice. Each character is configured with a role, a backstory, and awareness of the villa’s spaces and objects, so exchanges remain coherent, context-sensitive, and aligned with instructional tasks. Instructors can tune pace, turn length, complexity, and topical boundaries, adapting the experience to different proficiency levels—from beginner-friendly comprehension and basic vocabulary, to intermediate work on past tenses and reported speech, to advanced conversation and register shifts.

A key dimension of the project is its narrative design. Delaney Johnson, a University of Florida Honors alumna (Psychology, Linguistics, Italian), developed a structured nine-act story arc that situates learning objectives within credible scenarios: from winter in Venice to arrival at Villa Forni Cerato, and onward to a summer fair in Troyes (France). This arc functions as a pedagogical script, guiding students through encounters that connect language, art, and place while supporting targeted outcomes—for instance, recounting events, negotiating decisions, or narrating visits and meetings. Within this framework, diegetic artifacts (including a poem initially drafted with ChatGPT-4o mini and then revised for style and instructional fit) contribute to world-building and provide prompts for interpretation, discussion, and creative response.

Together, the villa’s digital twin, conversational characters, and narrative structure form a living lab for language practice and literary interpretation: immersive, repeatable, and scalable beyond a single site.