We visited Japan’s Immersive Journey to try two of these experiences for ourselves.
Free-roaming VR and XR experiences feel like a glimpse into the potential of VR beyond gaming as a tool for education or entertainment communally, beyond the solitary experience often found when putting on a headset. VR concerts and fan content, or experiences like the recent Ghost in the Shell exhibition, showcase how you can create a social experience that enhances, rather than detaches, from the real world, bringing people together. Often the thing holding them back is not ambition but practicality. Space, language and scale are all factors that make it difficult to expand these experiences beyond one country, especially if it’s a larger free-roaming experience like Monster Hunter Bridge that requires a huge space to function. This space comes at a cost, for the same reason a cinema is more expensive to operate than a cafe.
Even if the software is digital, the limitations are frustratingly physical and practical.
Excurio is one of the few VR developers creating these large-scale experiences that have found the balance necessary to grow into an international force within this niche but growing market. Based in France, sub-licensing of their ambitious, deep, educational VR experiences has brought these works to over 30 venues ranging from Europe to North America to Asia, localized as necessary. The company was founded as Emissive in 2005, before launching this immersive initiative in 2020 at a time many were pulling away from the sector.
Their selling point is their ambition: these are 45 minute interactive stories that encourage players to explore and learn about a past brought to life, occasionally working with museums and cultural initiatives in various countries to find and develop these works with a focus on history and immersion. Utilizing HTC Vive headsets, players explore these universally understood landmark moments in history that transcend language as though they were really there.
In Yokohama, a city just a short train ride from Japan’s capital, Tokyo, two of their experiences have been sub-licensed to Immersive Journey for anyone to try for themselves. In Horizon of Khufu, players are encouraged to explore the Khufu pyramid, including areas closed off to the public in real life and told from both the perspective of the present day and a journey 4500 years into the past to see them at the peak of their radiance. Tonight With the Impressionists is set in the heart of France in 1874, during the origins of the Impressionist art movement, focused on key artists that shaped the era.
At the gracious invite of the Cinema Leap team in Japan that operates these Excurio-developed VR experiences, we made the trip to Yokohama to try them for ourselves.
Horizon of Khufu
When Excurio first made the leap into creating these large-scale VR experiences, they turned to the pyramids. Horizon of Khufu is a narrative walk-through explainer of the development of the pyramids, told via an exclusive night-time VIP tour that soon descends into a journey through time and space via the gods to explore the very depths of what the pyramids and Egyptian society were at their peak. At least, based on what current Egyptologists understand of its creation, which creates for both the most fascinating and frustrating aspect of an experience that, while fun, certainly feels like a lingering first attempt by a company still finding its feet at the time of its development.
The Great Pyramid of Khufu stands as the tallest of the pyramids, honoring a pharaoh whose life is relatively unknown despite being considered one of the most beloved rulers during the golden age of Ancient Egyptian society. The construction of such a monolithic structure is a wonder of the world today for a reason: the mere concept any human civilization could build something like this at that time is still awe-inspiring to consider, only heightened by how we still are yet to uncover the truth of its construction even a millennium later. Your tour guide Mona initially takes you into the pyramid, through public tunnels and into the large open space known as the Queen’s Chamber.
This is where the so-far typical tour takes a turn. The electrical lights installed in modern decades for tourist purposes suddenly go out, with Mona asking you to wait behind while they investigate the cause further. At this moment, a cat that sneaked inside the temple with you reveals themselves to be the feline goddess Bastet, who proceeds to take you beyond the physical limits to see an internal X-ray of the pyramid before taking you and Mona through time to learn not just about these colossal structures, but the ceremonies, temples and lives that existed around them during their peak.
It’s a genuine attempt to use VR to make an educational lecture about the pyramids entertaining for all ages. We start outside the pyramid and physically walk through tunnels in VR in order to explore these tunnels. The outside of the pyramid from the ground is imposing, while an impressive attention to detail reveals individual stones close enough it feels like you could touch them. When we are transported to ancient Egypt, we journey on a replica of a solar barque, a replica of the type of boat used by Khufu during his reign. VR grants a window into his embalming and mummification after his death to give us a deeper understanding of how these ceremonies were conducted, to the point of even allowing us a glimpse inside the coffin itself.
Yet the experience, for all its interesting factual elements, is very hands-off and wordy, at times to its detriment. This is truly a lecture in VR conducting an overview of Egyptian history, and the result is an experience we less interact with and more are told about as we watch on, at times not moving for minutes at a time. Over 18 months of co-operation between Excurio and Peter Der Manuelian, an Egyptologist at Harvard University, ensures even the minutiae of how the pyramids are rendered and the ancient rituals are recreated are accurate to the best of our current understanding, acknowledging that gaps in our knowledge lost to time remain. Yet compared to the shorter, more action-driven experiences offered somewhere like Tyffonium, this can feel at times exhausting by virtue of how this history is being communicated via the narrative of the experience.
Without a broad cast of characters – at most you will be joined by only Mona and Bastet, with most of the experience featuring just one of these companions talking directly at you, rather than in conversation – there are long periods that can feel like a pretty VR backdrop to a podcast that could easily be made more involved to take advantage of the medium. When it does this, such as the moment it takes you above the pyramid at sunrise before transforming the environment into a rendition of what it looked like 4500 years ago, watching these buildings restore to their glory and the Nile River grow, it’s a joy.
These other moments leave the overall experience somewhat mixed, albeit one I certainly left feeling satisfied with when I eventually took off the headset. I find the pyramids a fascinating relic of a past civilization, with VR being effective in communicating the scale and immensity of these constructions that alone makes it worth the cost of entry, especially as its free-roam nature lets you truly feel present in this ancient world. Wordy, inconsistent pacing aside, the pyramids alone are fascinating enough to justify the journey.
Tonight With the Impressionists: Paris 1874
Tonight With the Impressionists could not be more different in both structure and approach to exploring the period in which it’s set. Replacing Egypt for 19th Century Paris, this is a structurally far more engaging piece as it seeks to illuminate not just the famous artworks, but the philosophical debates that consumed the art world surrounding this new style of painting.
Originally launched in 2024, it’s clear years of experience have enhanced the work and given the team an understanding for what works, these lessons implemented into this artistic lesson. Rather than being lectured, we’re invited into a journey through time and feel a part of the intimate conversations and debates of Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and others that would go to define the era.
For all you may not be familiar with every name of the artists featured in this experience, which also includes Berthe Morisot, Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro, you likely know their work. Monet’s impressionist pieces capturing the Parisian sunrise or a water lily pond are often considered some of the best artistic works ever made. While you may not know Renoir’s La Grenouillère, if you’ve ever looked at older paintings from the late-1800s you likely have a faint familiarity with the park lake scene portrayed in the work, and this is true for every piece featured in this walkthrough exhibit.
A collaboration with France’s Musée d’Orsay does more than just provide historical accuracy in this case, as their direct involvement is key to bringing this work to life. We enter the streets of 1870s France and meet a model and writer named Rose, who takes us through the streets to introduce us to the social history of the period before we enter a quaint home repurposed as one of the earliest solo exhibitions for Impressionist art. As we jump through time and beyond the confines of the gallery into the minds of the artists to explore the driving ideals of a movement craving interpretation of the mundane over posed spectacle, each moment is illuminated not just by rote recreations but high-quality scans of the real art pieces that reveal every paint stroke and sketch.
The best part of this exhibition, however, is the method taken to relay the history of the era. We meet each of the six featured artists and are invited warmly into their social circle to hear the debates these artists would have amongst one another about what art is and could be, inspired by the writings of the period. The result is more dynamic and involved, like listening to friends debate a topic you can’t help but overhear, an approach that makes the information they tell us far easier to digest and retain once the headset is removed. Writing is improved, natural dialogue that makes these conversations feel dynamic even if you can’t shape their outcome.
There is somewhat of a bias, admittedly, in my preference for this work over the other – while I love the pyramids and their spectacle, I also already know a lot about their construction. For all I know of these artistic works and the era, I didn’t know as much on the questions and conversations surrounding them, or what it meant to be Impressionist at the time the movement was being pioneered. I felt like I was learning more. It’s also no coincidence, however that a more casual format stripped of the grandiosity of a god talking down from a place of omnipotence as you physically walk the galleries and stare at the walls and art like you would any other museum felt more natural than standing on floating boats, making the 45 minutes quite literally fly by without even noticing the time, despite being the second demo of the day.
Should You Visit Immersive Journey in Yokohama?
That being said, I certainly enjoyed my time in both Egypt and Paris during my visit. Compared to other public free-roaming VR demos, the space offered to these two VR exhibitions made the grandiosity of these longer-than-normal experiences apparent – some smaller-scale ones, for all their ambition, make the reality of circling a parking space-sized room inevitably apparent while this had the space to truly lose yourself in another world.
For the credit of the team at Immersive Journey, everything is set up to ensure an easy onboarding process for anyone who wishes to take part, regardless of their prior experience with VR. Each experience is available in both English and Japanese, but also other languages like Korean and Spanish. Dubs have also been produced for each language. While I imagine most readers will try these experiences in English, it should be noted the attention to detail and care taken in these experiences translates even to the multi-language dubbing. In Japanese, the voice cast for Horizon of Khufu includes the talented Fairouz Ai, the voice of Jolyne Cujoh in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean.
There’s even accessibility considerations for those who struggle to stand and walk for long stretches of time, as each experience has been optimized to allow the entire experience to be played from the comfort of a provided wheelchair. It’s an accessibility concern I’ve never seen considered by similar experiences that typically exclude those requiring such needs, though its inclusion does make the omission of other accessibility features like subtitles for dialogue a surprising oversight.
The main critique that can be offered is less of a problem with the experience and more of a safety inevitability that can occasionally break the immersion of the worlds crafted. Considering the large space required to operate these VR experiences, as well as the time required to clear them, it would be impossible to reserve these spaces for just one group enacting one experience at a time. To avoid wandering into other players, any person not in your group that enters your field of vision is rendered as a shadow to let you know their location and to avoid bumping into them.
When you have a lot of groups and different experiences taking place at once, however, their appearances are regular and distracting, often tonally jarring to what is taking place in the virtual world you are a part of. In one sequence during Tonight With the Impressionists, I was stood on a narrow balcony watching Monet paint his famous sunrise when, floating above the sea to my right, I saw two silhouettes appear in view and walk right through the scene, including directly through Monet’s canvas. Their appearance ensured I didn’t bump into them, though seeing two labored shadows saunter through this emotional scene did take away from the impact of this genuinely beautiful recreation.
This even occurred during a quieter period with far fewer interruptions compared to my Horizon of Khufu demo. With two large groups before and after me, and other groups already moving through the space at the time I began my journey, the room appeared at capacity, which was noticed when I had shadows wander through my feline goddess guide and float through the clouds. It’s far from a dealbreaker and can be ignored (I’d certainly not recommend removing them, considering the safety risk of doing so), but it was an occasional immersion-breaking frustration.
Even with this stumbling block, though, I found both Immersive Journey experiences to be a thrilling and entertaining breeze through history, blending education and VR in ways that felt fresh and ambitious. At just 4000 yen per experience there’s a lot on offer in these 45 minutes to justify the cost, especially with friends. Beyond Yokohama, the Horizon of Khufu experience is also available in Nagoya, and both experiences can also be found in select locations in Brazil, Canada and beyond. Yokohama is a wonderful city with plenty to see, but taking a step away from it all for an hour to travel through time is far from a bad use of your time.
The technical merits and engaging reinterpretation of the past are more than worth a break from sightseeing for this innovative method of bringing the past to life. You might even learn something along the way, and at the very least experience something at a scale beyond what similar groups are attempting in the space. Considering the expense and difficulties that come with making it to Paris or Egypt, it’s also a chance to virtually travel for a far more affordable cost than the real thing.