Artist Antony Gormley has teamed up with astrophysicist Priya Natarajan on a virtual-reality experience that allows users to walk on a digital version of the moon created using data from NASA.
The 15-minute immersive experience sees visitors don a virtual-reality (VR) headset to travel from an imagined version of Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, through the earth's atmosphere to the moon, where they can walk across its surface.
On the way, they pass through the stratosphere and around virtual asteroid belts before eventually travelling from the moon on towards the sun.
Visitors use virtual reality to travel through the earth's atmosphere to the moon
"Our nearest neighbour is the moon, and this project allows us to experience it as a found object in space, to explore its vast open spaces and swoop the ridges and valleys of its craters," said Gormley. "This collaboration is an opportunity to experience the mind/body relationship in a new way and consider our own body's relationship to other bodies in space."
Surface of the moon digitally recreated
Produced with Acute Art, a virtual and augmented reality production studio that specialises in creating digital artworks, the experience takes place in a room kitted out with five VR headsets at The Store X's space at 180 The Strand in London.
With Acute Art's chief technology officer Rodrigo Marques, the pair recreated the surface of the moon, using the publicly available data set from NASA's ongoing Lunar...