Walk Versailles digitally in VR with Google

From now on, anyone who wants to visit the Palace of Versailles no longer has to travel to France: A Google team has taken 132,000 high-resolution photos and generated a detailed 3D model of the palace from them using photogrammetry. Even a night tourist is possible.

After you have started with a Virtual Reality Jetpack fly over Paris and also the Notre-Dame de Paris Another sight joins the ranks as a virtual experience.

In the largest photogrammetry project for the Palace of Versailles to date, according to Google, a team scanned a total of 21 rooms and around 36,000 square metres of the palace complex. Not only the rooms themselves, but also what is in them was digitised by means of photoscanning: Versailles can now be visited from the Hall of Mirrors to the King's bedchamber. In the virtual tour, there are 18 curated exhibitions with over 390 items (objects, artefacts, paintings) and 18 objects in 3D. All works can be viewed up close and in full detail. The partly impressive 3D scans are outside of VR available in Google's 3D database Poly.

Night walk through the Palace of Versailles

In total, according to Google, over four terabytes of data were processed and more than 15 billion pixels were generated for "unlimited and privileged access to the treasures of the villa", as Google describes the application scenario.

The tour takes in the private chambers of the King and Queen, the Opera House, the Chapel and the Hall of Mirrors, among other things. For those who need something even more exclusive: A night mode can be activated at the touch of a button so that you can explore the villa in pale moonlight.

The app can be downloaded for free from Steam and officially supports Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Valve Index.

The tour is now available as a free virtual reality app on Steam available. The website of the online exhibition is available in English, alternatively you can translate it into German with Google Translate (click on a button). However, this does not apply to the tours (Stories from the Palace, Artworks Up Close, Never-Before-Seen Content). Nevertheless, the pictures are worth a virtual visit. Available in German is the quiz: "Which Royal would you be?"

Source: Mixed / Youtube /onlinepc