We advance carefully, avoiding onlookers and benches occupying the central space.
Around us stand the walls and decorations of the building: stained glass windows, paintings, engravings, statues, lighting... Nothing is missing.
All we have to do is approach or change the angle for new wonders to reveal themselves to our eyes.
This immersion is striking.
We visit Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris as it looked in 2012. On that day, historian Andrew Tallon used a Lidar (laser beam) sensor to record the exact position and color of 1.4 billion , inside and outside the monument.
Everything is listed, from the faces of onlookers to Andrew's measuring devices, as well as his briefcase and calculator on a bench.
The point cloud was recently compiled by the Teleporteam software from the French company Dassault Systèmes*, in order to carry out a 3D modeling of the space and to design a virtual teleportation experience called “Notre-Dame de Paris, the virtual twin ".
Wearing a virtual reality headset, it is possible to wander naturally in this freeze frame, as if you were moving inside a photo.
A real time journey.
A click with the Apple Vision Pro headset?
A VR headset is a device intended to immerse oneself in virtual reality.
There are many popular initiatives in the field of video games, notably with the Meta Quest 3 headset launched by Mark Zuckerberg.
At the same time, the boss of Facebook tried to impose his metaverse, a parallel world where we could work, have fun, buy, without leaving home.
Without success for the moment... The trigger will perhaps come from the giant Apple which has just released its Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset in the United States.
VR technology can in fact be used in multiple contexts, such as physical training, medicine or even historical reenactment.
Also read “It’s the future but it’s too uncomfortable”: Apple Vision Pro buyers prefer to part with their headset
Several initiatives are currently emerging, in Paris and in the provinces, to present wonders of past eras, difficult to access or even impossible to visit.
We tested three: “Notre-Dame de Paris, the virtual twin”, “The Horizon of Kheops”, dedicated to the great pyramid and the plateau of Giza and “Tutankhamun, the pharaonic immersive experience”.
We could also have included “Eternelle Notre-Dame”, to relive the construction of the cathedral in VR (eternellenotredame.com).
Likewise, Flyview offers a trip to the cathedral before and after the fire, but also the discovery of the pyramids of Egypt, the secrets of Paris or the most beautiful sites in France (flyview360.com).
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