Step Inside King Tut’s Tomb With This New Virtual-Reality Experience—Possibly the Best Part of London’s Tutankhamun Blockbuster

A new virtual reality experience
is on view in tandem with the record-breaking Tutankhamun exhibit
at London’s Saatchi Gallery this holiday season, and it may be the
best part of the show.

The VR film is an addition to
the main exhibition,
which was organized by the Egyptian ministry of culture to
fundraise for its $1 billion Grand Egyptian Museum project. The
blockbuster world tour of burial artifacts belonging to the boy
king has already traveled to Los Angeles and Paris, where it drew
more than 1.4 million visitors during its run, and is due to travel
on to seven more cities in Australia, Japan, Canada, and South
Korea, as well as a few more locations that have yet to be
announced.

The London leg has been no
exception in terms of visitor numbers, making the experience of the
show’s artifacts a stiflingly claustrophobic one—all the more
reason for the allure of the virtual-reality project “Tutankhamun:
Enter the Tomb.”

The eight-minute experience was
produced by CityLights, an immersive entertainment company
cofounded by Hollywood filmmaker Joel Newton, and financier and art
collector David Ganek. Newton tells Artnet News that the pair
started the company to explore VR as a creative tool for
storytelling, and that they chose King Tut because they wanted a
story compelling enough to motivate people to try out the
technology.

“A general audience is waiting
for a reason to put that headset on, and there is no bigger brand
than King Tut in terms of the size of the crowds he attracts,”
Newton says.

Enter the Tomb

The experience is accessible via
one of the Positron Voyager chairs, a sort of egg chair designed to
offer a cinematic VR experience. After you don the headset, you are
catapulted into the desert in the Valley of Kings and you enter
into a photorealistic version of the tomb as archaeologist Howard
Carter would have uncovered it in 1922.

The experience is narrated by
the actor Hugh Bonneville in a character not unlike the fictional
earl Bonneville plays in Downton Abbey, meant to recall the real-life Lord Carnarvon
who bankrolled Carter’s Egyptian expedition, and who also lived in
Highclere Castle, where the popular British television drama is
set.

Bonneville’s narration takes
viewers on a whistle-stop tour of the mysterious tomb, including a
visit to the hastily sealed-off hidden chamber containing King
Tut’s remains and priceless treasures. The experience recalls one
of those ride-through tours at Disney World (the egg chair sways as
you move through the tomb), and the audience response when I
visited was very positive, especially among young children, who
were begging their parents to let them do it again.

Newton credits his experience in
Hollywood for the overall response to the project, as well as to
the screenwriting chops of writers Bart and Gabriel Gavigan. He
says the duo had a “strong instinct” for choosing the details that
would promote a human connection to the legendary king, emphasizing
his youth, personal relationships, and the fact that he was
physically disabled.

Virtual Reality’s Artful Applications

While this version of the
experience will play with the Tut exhibition as it tours the world
(the short film will set visitors back an additional £16.50),
Newton explains that there is already a roadmap for the company to
expand it into a longer piece that could travel as a standalone to
libraries and museums in the future.

“We’ve been having a lot of
really interesting conversations in the art world with museums and
what we could do to extend a museum’s brand,” Newton says. “The
best art show of the year will be up for a few months in a European
city, and yet all the young people in Detroit, Cleveland, or
Chicago, or kids in remote parts of the world who in some ways
might be the humans that need the inspiration most, don’t get to
see it.”

Newton sees VR as one possible
solution to the logistical challenges and expense of moving
priceless masterpieces around the world. “I think looking forward,
there is a great possibility of VR to bring virtual tourism. Very
few kids are going to get the chance to go to Egypt, and in the
same way, there’s a real limiting factor of being able to have an
experience with a masterpiece.”

The director says the most
useful applications of VR are in allowing a viewer to experience
“things that are rare, things that are impossible, and things that
are dangerous.” Outside of the art world, the company recently
partnered with the NFL football player Patrick Mahomes  who
will coach viewers in something they are calling “The MVP
Experience.”

Tutankhamun: Enter the Tomb
is on view concurrently with the exhibition “Tutankhamun: Treasures
of The Golden Pharaoh” at Saatchi Gallery in London through May 3,
2020. 

The post Step Inside King Tut’s Tomb With This New
Virtual-Reality Experience—Possibly the Best Part of London’s
Tutankhamun Blockbuster appeared first on artnet
News.