VR Voyage

VR Voyage is a live canal boat tour through Amsterdam where passengers put on VR headsets at 7 stops and see their exact surroundings as they looked around 1650. Each scene had to be full 3D at real-world scale and as historically accurate as possible: buildings still standing today modeled at their exact positions, and lost ones rebuilt from old paintings and drawings. And because it's 360, every corner had to hold up, wherever the viewer looks.

I started with a proof-of-concept scene, and once that was approved I built the scenes together with colleagues. I did the environments, layout, materials, water and rendering, and they did the characters, animation and a building generator. Simulating the ocean was too heavy, so I baked the water into a looping texture that drives the waves and foam, with a wake where the boat moves through it. Most of the scenes, from canal walls to scattered props and vegetation, are built with geometry nodes, which kept 7 locations quick to change and consistent without looking repetitive. Rendering it all took a render farm across the office PCs. And since you can't cut or reframe in VR, each scene is composed so the action draws the eye on its own.

The project resulted in seven 360 scenes of Amsterdam around 1650, from a harbor full of period ships like the Batavia to the VOC shipyard and the old city wall. They play on headsets during a 75-minute tour, as the boat passes the exact spots where each scene is set.

VR Voyage is live and running tours, and the client is already planning a second version in another city. After 17 months we also knew Blender wasn't the right tool at this scale, so the next version would be built in Unreal Engine.