Presented by the French Embassy in Ireland and Institut français as part of Irish Design Week and Novembre Numérique, in association with French Tech Dublin, The Digital Hub and Alliance française Dublin.

At the heart of the video game Assassin's Creed: Unity, released in 2014, Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris was reconstructed thanks to 5,000 hours of graphic work, guided by historians. Based on this data, Ubisoft has created a virtual tour of Notre-Dame, offering the chance to (re)discover the cathedral from different vantage points, some of which are inaccessible to the public (the roof, the flying buttresses...), in the heart of a living Paris of the late 18th century. Visitors wearing virtual reality headsets are invited to look around and admire the perspectives, to the sound of the famous Cavaillé-Coll organ. Created shortly after the cathedral's devastating fire, this experience was shown to the public for the first time at UNESCO headquarters during the Heritage Days in October 2019, and was then offered throughout 2021 at the Paris Archaeological Crypt, as part of the “Notre-Dame de Paris: de Victor Hugo à Viollet-le-Duc” exhibition. It is now available through the Instituts Français and Micro-Folies networks.

Image credit: Courtesy of the artist