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There is something faintly audacious about attempting to resurrect a civilization as vast, contradictory, and mythologized as ancient Rome inside a headset. Yet ROME, in the footsteps of Caesar, the new VR experience produced in Montreal by Studio Shaman, embraces that ambition with a confidence that is at once uneven and, at its best, genuinely transporting. What emerges is not a perfect simulation, but a strikingly evocative one—an experience that succeeds less through narrative subtlety than through the overwhelming visual authority of its world.
From the outset, the production frames itself through the voice and perspective of Julius Caesar, positioning the viewer not merely as an observer but as a kind of temporal confidant. The conceit is effective. Caesar, suspended in a surreal liminal space of marble and mist, becomes both guide and ghost, ushering participants through the rise and imminent collapse of the Republic in 44 BCE. The framing device is theatrical, even operatic, and it prepares the viewer for what the experience does best: spectacle.
And spectacle, here, is rendered with remarkable conviction. The recreation of the Roman Forum—that dense nexus of political, religious, and commercial life—is a triumph of spatial storytelling. One does not simply see the Forum; one feels its scale, its congestion, its architectural ambition. Columns tower with persuasive weight, marble gleams under an Italian sun that feels almost tactile, and the geometry of power—basilicas, temples, and speaking platforms—reveals itself intuitively while the interiors—rich with draped textiles, gilded ornament, and carefully staged opulence—extend that same authority inward, evoking the cultivated luxury of elite Roman life, from senatorial halls to the intimate grandeur of Caesar’s own tent.
It is in these moments that the experience achieves something rare in VR: a sense of historical proximity. The grandeur and splendor of Roman architecture, often flattened in textbooks into diagrams and ruins, is here restored to its original theatricality. The interiors, in particular, are revelatory. Lavish domestic spaces—suggestive of elite domus—unfold in saturated color and intricate detail, reminding us that Roman power was not only exercised in public but performed in private, through luxury, ornament, and control of space.
The highlight, perhaps, is the vantage point offered inside the Circus Maximus. To witness the arena from Caesar’s loge is to understand, viscerally, the politics of spectacle in ancient Rome. The sheer scale of the structure, combined with the implied roar of the crowd, conveys more about Roman mass culture than any lecture could. It is a moment of alignment between historical insight and sensory immersion, and it lingers.
Equally compelling, though more easily overlooked, is a quieter scene set within a Roman fast-food establishment—a thermopolium. These spaces, only recently brought vividly to public attention through excavations in Pompeii, offer a glimpse into everyday life that feels refreshingly unheroic. Archaeologists have uncovered vividly painted counters and food containers that suggest a bustling street-food culture, challenging long-held assumptions about Roman dining habits. For a visual reference, this reconstruction of a Pompeian food counter is particularly illuminating: . That the VR experience includes such a moment—small, almost incidental—speaks to its broader commitment to situating grandeur alongside the ordinary.
Yet for all its visual sophistication, ROME, in the footsteps of Caesar reveals its limitations in its human dimension. The virtual characters, who populate the experience and occasionally invite interaction, are its weakest element. Their movements lack fluidity, their expressions feel constrained, and their presence rarely achieves the illusion of lived reality. In a medium that thrives on immersion, this stiffness becomes difficult to ignore. The figures seem less like inhabitants of a living world than like animated annotations within it.
This shortcoming is particularly evident in moments that aim for dramatic weight, such as scenes set in Curia of Pompey, the site of Caesar’s assassination. The architecture convinces; the atmosphere holds. But the characters—senators, conspirators—fail to embody the tension the setting demands. The result is a curious imbalance: one believes in the room, but not entirely in the people within it.
The interactive elements, too, feel more obligatory than essential. Gesture-based manipulation of objects is technically impressive, but it rarely deepens the experience in meaningful ways. One senses that the production is aware of contemporary expectations around interactivity and has responded accordingly, without fully integrating those mechanics into its storytelling. The experience would lose little, and perhaps gain coherence, if it leaned more decisively into its strengths as a guided, cinematic journey.
Where the production shows notable restraint—and wisdom—is in its approach to movement. Rather than requiring participants to physically “walk” through each environment, transitions are largely handled through technological shifts: dissolves, repositioning, and controlled perspective changes. In an era when VR often overestimates users’ tolerance for simulated locomotion, this choice feels humane. It minimizes the risk of disorientation or dizziness, allowing the viewer to remain focused on the environments themselves. The result is a smoother, more accessible experience that prioritizes clarity over novelty.
What ultimately defines ROME, in the footsteps of Caesar is its ability to reconstitute a world that has long existed in fragments. Ancient Rome, as most encounter it, is a city of ruins and reconstructions, of scholarly conjecture and cinematic exaggeration. Here, it is something else: a coherent, navigable space that can be apprehended in 45 minutes. The compression is necessarily reductive—no experience could encompass the full complexity of Rome—but it is also clarifying. By moving from the founding myths of the city to the brink of imperial transformation, the production offers a distilled narrative that is both educational and emotionally resonant.
There is, too, a subtle poignancy in experiencing this world through Caesar’s perspective. His presence, hovering between triumph and mortality, lends the journey a sense of inevitability. The viewer is not merely touring Rome; they are witnessing a civilization at a turning point, aware—if only dimly—of what is about to be lost and transformed.
The experience is not without flaws. Its characters lack vitality, its interactivity feels underdeveloped, and its narrative occasionally leans toward the didactic. Yet these shortcomings do not diminish its central achievement. When it turns its attention to architecture, to space, to the material culture of power and daily life, it becomes something quietly extraordinary.
In the end, ROME, in the footsteps of Caesar is less about Caesar himself than about the world he inhabited and helped reshape. It is an invitation to see Rome not as ruin, but as presence—to stand, however briefly, within its grandeur and its contradictions. Imperfect though it may be, it is an experience that lingers, and one that is easy to recommend to anyone curious about the ancient world, or about the evolving possibilities of virtual reality as a medium for historical imagination.
For a better understanding of the structures then and now:
