Description

Everest: The First Ascent is a free-roam VR experience from Eclipso Entertainment and Small Creative, directed by Jean Dallac and Benjamin Auriche. It retraces the 1953 British expedition that made the first confirmed ascent of Mount Everest, with Edmund Hillary, Tenzing Norgay and the Sherpa team. Visitors join the expedition in Kathmandu, cross the high-altitude camps and glaciers, and reach the summit, with Tenzing Norgay as their guide through the story.

Eclipso developed the experience with a scientific advisory board: Katia Buffetrille, a professor who specialises in the sacred mountains of Tibetan Buddhism, Charlie Buffet, a writer and journalist on mountaineering history, and Lapka Sherpa Gelgen, a Sherpa guide who has summited Everest seven times. Pierre-Edouard Nobels wrote the screenplay and Blanktone composed the music. The experience previewed at Venice Immersive, the XR section of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, in September 2026, where the Biennale lists a running time of 37 minutes and English as the language.

Visitors move freely, standing, without cables or controllers, on a dedicated platform. Eclipso runs its free-roam experiences in spaces of 300 to 1,000 square metres, on VIVE Focus Series headsets with VIVE’s Location-Based Software Suite. Eclipso lists the session at 40 minutes and advises allowing about an hour on site for welcome, briefing, equipment and debriefing; its launch release describes a 35-minute VR experience inside a visit of about 50 minutes including onboarding. The minimum age is 8, and minors must be accompanied by a responsible adult for the whole session. Eclipso does not recommend the experience for people with heart problems, epilepsy or a pacemaker.

Everest: The First Ascent opened at Eclipso NYC, 555 West 57th Street in Manhattan, on 30 September 2026, as the fourth title there alongside Titanic: Echoes of the Past, Colosseum: The Legendary Arena and Space Explorers: The ISS Experience. Eclipso also lists it at its centres in London, Barcelona, Seville, Lille and Nantes, and opens it at Pocket Planet Canada, 10 Dundas Street East in Toronto, on 10 November 2026. Eclipso offers Everest, Titanic and Colosseum to partner venues outside its own centres and supports those partners on technical installation, team training, and marketing and communication.

At the 2026 LEXRA Summit in Dallas, Everest: The First Ascent won the People’s Choice Award as the highest-rated experience on the demo floor, rated by attendees on LEXRA’s REMARKABLE framework at Gilley’s Dallas on 6 October 2026.

Additional information