An Immersive Notre Dame
John Hill
4. December 2024
Still image of digital rendering of Notre-Dame Cathedral (Image: Ars Electronica)
To celebrate the reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris five years after a devastating fire necessitated an extensive and speedy restoration and reconstruction, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) is exhibiting an immersive, three-dimensional digital model of the Gothic landmark. A video from Ars Electronica Futurelab details their digital reconstruction and its virtual presentation.
Using point cloud data from scans predating the April 2019 fire, Notre-Dame Cathedral: An Immersive Experience is made from more than one billion points of information, most of them visualizing the church's interior. Presented in “Deep Space 8K,” the immersive exhibition allows visitors to the MFAH to “experience” the building as it was before the destruction, its gleaming restoration and reconstruction, and its reopening on December 7 and 8. While the MFAH display is aligned with other high-profile immersive experiences of artworks in recent years, Ars Electronica Futurelab contends that it also “highlights the importance of new technologies in the preservation and communication of humanity’s cultural heritage.”