Description

The Holy City is a virtual reality documentary experience made by Blimey of Israel with OccupiedVR of Canada. Nimrod Shanit directed and produced it, Timur Musabay co-directed and Sean Thomas Evans was executive producer. It takes visitors to the sacred sites of Jerusalem’s Old City, including the Western Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Cathedral of St. James, the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and follows three residents through Easter, Passover and Ramadan: Father Samuel Aghoyan, Armenian superior at the Holy Sepulchre, during the Holy Fire ceremony; Rabbi Baruch Brandwein at the priestly blessing at the Western Wall; and Hajj Ibrahim Abu El-Hawa at Ramadan night prayers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. An interfaith team of Jewish, Christian and Muslim filmmakers captured the sites with volumetric scanning, photogrammetry and stereoscopic 360-degree film.

Blimey licenses The Holy City to venues in four formats. The single-user installation is the full-length version with every volumetric environment and 360 film segment. It runs 45 minutes on a PC VR headset and needs a 3m by 3m space and one trained staff member. The multi-user tandem installation, on permanent display at the Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem, puts one participant in a VR headset while the rest of the group follows that view on a large screen and works through the challenges on a parallel augmented reality tablet. It runs 30 minutes on a PC VR headset with a Windows AR tablet and needs a 4m by 4m space, a Wi-Fi router with a dedicated access point and one trained staff member. The guided tour format takes groups of up to 20 through the holy sites with a tour guide in 15 to 30 minutes on mobile VR headsets, with optional casting to a screen or projector for viewers outside the headsets. A three-minute short-format stereo 360 film, cut from the film segments, runs without controllers on any headset that plays stereo 360 video.

Blimey positions the single-user version for religious and cultural centers and educational institutions. Licensees to date include the Tower of David Museum, the Arizona Jewish Historical Society, the Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto and the Davidson Center. A consumer release of the documentary version reached Steam, Viveport and the Meta store in 2020, in English.

The Holy City won the Lumiere Award for Best Educational XR, the Games for Change award for Best XR for Change and Best Interactive VR Experience at the Byron Bay Film Festival 2019. It was an official selection at Cannes XR 2019, the Guanajuato International Film Festival 2019 and the Raindance Film Festival 2019, where it was nominated for Best Documentary Experience.

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