Trees exhibition - VR experience

Trees has been one of the most successful recent exhibitions at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris. After its debut in 2019, Trees was presented in Shanghai on the Summer of 2021 and LR Studio was commissioned to create the VR experience of the exhibition in China.

The VR experience enhanced the exhibition organized around several large ensembles of works, that give voice to numerous figures who, through their aesthetic or scientific journey, have developed a strong, intimate link with trees, thereby revealing the beauty and biological wealth of these great protagonists of the living world, threatened today with large-scale deforestation.

Technology-wise it was an achievement as it included more than 200, 2D and 3D artworks, and videos of the exhibition, and a very complex urban landscape with a very high-quality rendering outcome.

At the beginning of the Tree VR experience users find themselves at a park surrounded by trees. It’s dark night so users “feel” the presence of the trees through the sound of wind and moving leaves, while a voice over introduces the concept of the exhibition.

The user is then teleported to the exhibition, a 3D reconstruction of the actual exhibition where the users can move and explore and learn more about the artists.

Finally, the users enter a portal to a game, inspired on the work of the Chinese botanist Hu Yonghong, where they can learn more about the four most common urban trees in Shanghai, the history of the role of trees in urbanism and, more importantly, they can select and plant trees around them and feel the transformation that they bring to our brick-and-mortar urban environments.

The whole experience is enriched by immersive sound design that takes the users from the exhibition journey to the transformational effect that trees bring to our cities and our lives.