Hope Springs Eternal

Location-based virtual reality, or LBVR for short, has been through an interesting journey in recent years. Back in 2019, when I first started working at CCS Insight, the idea of finding a VR experience at museums and galleries, or in arcades specifically designed for the technology, felt like it was becoming popular. But then came the pandemic, which shut down the entire premise of a location-based experience; the focus for VR instead shifted to transporting people to new locations from their home.

The world of LBVR feels like it’s needed a little time to pick back up in popularity, and I was excited to be invited to test out an experience in Paris, courtesy of Orange, exploring the restoration of the Notre-Dame cathedral. The experience, Eternal Notre-Dame, has been built by creative firm Emissive in partnership with the French operator, with various Parisian organizations contributing to the renovation of the cathedral.

Notre-Dame itself remains closed as renovation continues, but its underground car park just across the road has now been repurposed as the base for the LBVR experience. This provides a large, open space, which has been cladded with a heavy-duty patterned vinyl including QR codes, allowing external cameras on VR headsets to measure their position in the space. The experience uses the HTC Vive Focus 3 as its headset of choice, but oddly requires visitors to also don a HP VR Backpack to power the experience despite the standalone functionality of the headset.

With headsets on, our group was guided into the experience space, where we met our virtual “guide” — a glowing ethereal figure who would accompany us throughout the tour. We began by travelling back to the streets of Paris during the construction of the cathedral. Walking through cobbled streets, we were able to watch as craftsmen assembled elements of the building from its gothic exterior to its wooden support structures, before climbing to the upper reaches of the cathedral to take in its stained-glass windows and famous bell towers. The website for Eternal Notre-Dame conveys this well.

What truly impressed me about this was the sense of flow, both in the narrative of the VR experience, and the physical way we moved through the space. As I strolled through the virtual world with our guide, weaving through busy streets and even ducking under virtual beams in the bell tower, I realized that the lack of physical boundaries in the event space was contributing to the sense of immersion. Compared with using VR in a small place like a living room, having a huge space to walk around with next to no interruptions made me almost forget that I was in a virtual world.

After the experience, I spoke to Morgan Bouchet, Orange’s global head of extended reality, Web3 and metaverse technologies, who discussed the importance of the project in contributing to Paris’ cultural heritage. For the proud French operator, it’s a way to play a role in educating visitors about one of the country’s most famous landmarks and raise money in the process — a third of the €30 entry fee goes to the Notre-Dame restoration fund.

Mr Bouchet also sees this as a demonstration of Orange’s focus on immersive technologies, noting that the company doesn’t want to be speculative without any genuine intent. A slight caveat is that the experience was powered by Wi-Fi rather than Orange’s 4G or 5G networks, which felt like a missed opportunity to show the credentials of the network for mobile extended reality. Still, Mr Bouchet says the exhibit has been well-received by everyday visitors as well as businesses; he expects that many of these business customers will look to explore areas like virtual and augmented reality in the future.

Reflecting on the visit, I have mixed views. I wouldn’t hesitate to describe Notre-Dame Eternal as one of the best LBVR experiences I’ve tried, and it’s fantastic to see the technology being used for something other than gaming in such an impressive way. I’d love to see more examples of LBVR being used in this sort of way, although I have to point out that the Notre-Dame car park is a fairly unique setting, and many museums and galleries would struggle to find the space to run something similar.

It’s also a great example of a network operator using extended reality to bring exciting new experiences to customers, which is something I wrote a free report about recently — you can access that here.

However, I can’t escape the fact that one of my favourite elements of the whole experience was the sense of boundless exploration. Using VR outside a confined area is genuinely transformational, but that only makes it feel more disappointing to have to move back to using it in my living room.

Orange confirmed that Eternal Notre-Dame will be available for Meta Quest and Pico headsets soon regardless of location, and it will be fascinating to see if the experience translates well to users in a more confined space. I hope it does. But overall, this is a reminder once again of the need to balance the strengths and weaknesses of VR, which can suffer in some scenarios but shine in others; the Eternal Notre-Dame experience is undoubtedly the latter.