About THE EXPERIENCE

Il Divino: Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling in VR is a Virtual Reality experience powered by Unreal Engine where you can walk through and learn about the Sistine Chapel Ceiling.

The demo was created exclusively for the SIGGRAPH 2019 Immersive Pavilion, by the team behind the previous SIGGRAPH 2017 VR piece: Il Gigante: Michelangelo’s David in VRDebuting at SIGGRAPH on Valve’s INDEX headset, Il Divino delivers an experience of the highest fidelity –you can see individual cracks and brush strokes in the plaster!

Attendees can step onto Michelangelo’s own scaffold to learn about how he painted the ceiling, or enter a Vatican conservator’s mobile aerial platform to see the ceiling up close, and learn about the controversial cleaning. In all, there are over 100 clickable elements connected to an hour of commentary talking about Michelangelo’s monumental work.

It has been released on Steam as a freely downloadable experience, and it will continue to be added to and improved in the future.

In the experience, a visitor is read a historical letter where Michelangelo describes the hardships he endured painting the Pope's ceiling.

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DISCLAIMER: This experience was created by piecing together public domain images. A personal project that took more than a decade. The creators did not photograph or scan the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican Museum complex (“NO PHOTO!”) and the Vatican was not involved in the creation of this experience. The vault 3D meshes were created by hand, relying on 19th century schematics, and a rough photogrammetry estimation from the above mentioned inputs.