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| Randall Smith, Associate Director – Strategic Initiatives, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, was in Montreal to introduce this extraordinary project and answer some questions. I asked him mainly about gravity and space travel, as well as the possibility of humans living on Mars. He explained that, at least for now, living on Mars would be a terrible experience for humans because of the lack of atmosphere, water, and any source of food. On top of that, Mars is exposed to deadly radiation that can be destructive to life. |
FRANÇAIS app de traduction plus haut
In Montréal’s Old Port, two immersive productions promise radically different journeys: one into the architecture of the cosmos, the other into the tumultuous world of Napoleon Bonaparte. Together, they raise a compelling question about virtual reality’s capacity to transform knowledge into experience.
There are two ways to lose oneself in time: to travel so far into the past that history acquires the immediacy of memory, or to venture so far into the universe that the human scale of existence begins to dissolve. This autumn, Montréal’s Old Port offers both possibilities. Beginning October 8, PHI presents two virtual reality experiences that move in opposite directions but converge on a common ambition: to make the incomprehensible tangible. Smithsonian Starstruck: An Immersive Experience invites audiences beyond Earth, into the spectacular machinery of stars, galaxies and black holes. Napoleon: The Immersive Saga transports them to the era of the French emperor, where military triumph, political ambition and the human cost of power unfold within a meticulously reconstructed historical world. One looks outward toward the immensity of the cosmos; the other looks backward into the restless theatre of human ambition. Both ask what happens when spectatorship gives way to presence.
The distinction matters. Virtual reality has spent years negotiating the uneasy territory between technological novelty and genuine artistic expression. Its capacity to surround an audience with images is no longer, by itself, a sufficient argument for its existence. Immersion becomes meaningful when it changes our relationship to what we see—when space ceases to be a backdrop and becomes a means of understanding. These two productions approach that challenge through different forms of authority. Smithsonian Starstruck draws upon astronomical research and scientific data, while Napoleon: The Immersive Saga grounds its historical narrative in specialist scholarship. Neither proposes that technological simulation can replace the patient work of learning. Rather, each explores how the sensation of being somewhere else might open a door that conventional exposition leaves closed.
In Smithsonian Starstruck, produced by Fever in collaboration with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, the universe becomes an environment through which visitors can move rather than an abstraction confined to diagrams, photographs or the distant surface of a screen. Over 40 minutes, audiences journey alongside some of humanity’s most powerful astronomical observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The resulting voyage passes through the Milky Way, approaches the Sun, encounters extreme exoplanets and follows the life cycle of stars toward the extraordinary presence of a supermassive black hole. Thousands of galaxies emerge within a three-dimensional expanse whose immensity challenges the instincts by which human beings ordinarily measure distance, scale and significance.
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| Visuels@Crédits: Fever |
The project’s most consequential feature, however, lies not in its promise of cosmic spectacle but in its grounding in real astronomical data. Developed with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, a research institution founded in 1890, Starstruck attempts to translate scientific knowledge into a sensory language without severing its connection to discovery. The distinction separates informed visualization from decorative science fiction. When the universe becomes walkable, navigable and responsive to the visitor’s movements, abstract knowledge acquires a bodily dimension. The experience suggests that scientific understanding need not be limited to the accumulation of facts; it can begin with wonder, with the vertiginous recognition that the world familiar to our senses is only a fragment of a much larger reality. The challenge is to ensure that visual enchantment remains an invitation to comprehension rather than an end in itself.
There is something quietly radical about bringing astronomical distances into a space that the human body can traverse. We cannot walk through a galaxy, touch a star or approach the event horizon of a black hole without confronting physical impossibility. Virtual reality does not abolish those limits, but it temporarily reorganizes our perception of them. The impossible becomes imaginable, and the unimaginable acquires contours. Selected in competition for Venice Immersive at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, Smithsonian Starstruck enters a field in which the boundaries between cinema, scientific visualization and interactive art are increasingly porous. Its significance will ultimately depend on whether it can sustain the delicate equilibrium between spectacle and insight. The cosmos is already magnificent; the artistic task is to reveal something within that magnificence that a beautiful image alone cannot tell us.
If Starstruck confronts the limits of human perception, Napoleon: The Immersive Saga turns toward the limits of human power. Created by French studio Sandora, the 28-minute experience places audiences inside the turbulent history of Napoleon Bonaparte and the First French Empire. Through virtual reality headsets and historically detailed reconstructions of iconic locations, visitors encounter a world shaped by conquest, political transformation, military calculation and the increasingly fragile promises of imperial glory. The narrative moves between victories and disasters, achievements and restrictions on freedom, presenting Napoleon not simply as a monumental figure in European history but as the centre of a story in which ambition continually collides with consequence.
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| Visuels de l"expérience_Crédits: Sandora |
Napoleon remains an especially revealing subject for this medium because his legacy resists easy containment. He was a military commander, a political architect, an agent of institutional reform and an emperor whose pursuit of domination brought devastation across Europe. His image has been repeatedly reconstructed by historians, artists and political cultures, oscillating between the brilliance of the strategist and the catastrophe of the conqueror. An immersive treatment of his era therefore carries an intriguing responsibility: to make the past immediate without making its central figure mythic by default. The most compelling historical experiences do more than place us amid the grandeur of power. They encourage us to consider the distance between the spectacle of victory and the suffering that sustains it, between the monument and the people whose lives become its foundations.
The contrast between these productions gives PHI’s autumn programme its particular intellectual appeal. In one experience, the individual becomes almost negligible against the immense duration and scale of the universe; in the other, individual ambition threatens to reorder a continent. One offers a confrontation with forces that exist beyond human intention, while the other examines the extraordinary consequences of intention itself. Their shared medium also reveals a central paradox of virtual reality: the more convincingly it simulates presence, the more urgently it must cultivate perspective. To feel transported is not necessarily to understand. The deepest promise of immersion emerges when physical immediacy produces intellectual distance—when being surrounded by an experience allows us to think more clearly about what lies beyond it.
Presented at 2 rue de la Commune Ouest in Montréal’s Old Port, both experiences are open since October 8 and are suitable for visitors aged eight and older. Their appeal extends beyond dedicated enthusiasts of astronomy, military history or emerging media. They address a broader curiosity about the worlds that exceed ordinary experience, whether those worlds are separated from us by unimaginable distances or by the centuries that divide the present from the past. In an era when digital spectacle is abundant, the distinction between being entertained and being genuinely transported has become increasingly important.
Ultimately, Smithsonian Starstruck and Napoleon: The Immersive Saga propose two different forms of displacement, each capable of returning audiences to themselves with a changed sense of scale. The first asks us to contemplate our place in a universe that neither begins nor ends with human concerns. The second confronts us with a history in which human decisions have repeatedly altered the lives of millions. Between the black hole and the battlefield stretches the full tension of our condition: our insignificance before the cosmos, our extraordinary capacity to reshape the world, and our persistent desire to make both legible. If these experiences fulfill their ambitions, their achievement will not be measured simply by how convincingly they transport us elsewhere, but by what they enable us to see differently when we return.
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