From Mecca to the Vatican, exploring sacred sites with VR

Click and gape at the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel ceiling up close. Click again and join thousands of pilgrims praying and circling around the cubeshaped Kaaba at Islam’s most sacred site. Or strap on a headset and enter the holy city of Jerusalem.

There you’ll hear the murmur of Jewish prayers at the Western Wall or thousands of worshippers saying amen in unison at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. You can even light a virtual candle at the site where Christians believe Jesus rose from the grave.

All without ever leaving home. Worshippers, tourists and visitors from around the world are increasingly joining virtual reality religious activities and pilgrimages to some of Earth’s most sacred sites. Such experiences are among the many evolving spaces in the metaverse, an immersive virtual world where people can connect via avatars, that have grown in popularity during the pandemic.

“We believe that virtual reality is, if you like, the new internet, the new way for people not to watch things passively on the screen and just to click on photos and videos, but to actually teleport themselves,” said Nimrod Shanit, CEO of HCXR and Blimey, the producers of The Holy City, an immersive VR experience that allows people to visit Jerusalem’s holiest sites.

Participants “get a sense of the different rituals, culture, architecture, get a sense of the world without the need to actually spend tons of money on travel and contribute to global carbon emissions,” Shanit said.

Using a 360-degree camera, a lidar scanner and his training as a photojournalist, Shanit in 2015 began to capture videos and photos of Christian, Islamic and Jewish religious festivals and holy sites in his native Jerusalem. He then stitched the footage and images together digitally to create a visually immersive experience.

Virtual pilgrims can follow Orthodox clerics as they emerge from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the Holy Fire ceremony, with candles lit by a fire that the faithful view as a divine message. They will also hear bells tolling and chants of “The Lord has risen!” in multiple languages. They can tuck a prayer note into a crack of the Western Wall, or follow the steps of thousands of worshippers during Ramadan at the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

To accurately render details of Jerusalem in the virtual space, developers scanned the holy sites and a large physical model made in the 19th century that is on loan at the city’s Tower of David Museum. Users can hover over this digital model leading to full-scale scans of the city entering through different gates that lead to the Cathedral of Saint James and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Western Wall, the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Shanit, who is Jewish, and his two partners — one Muslim, one Christian — hope The Holy City can foster dialogue and understanding between faiths.

Many Americans — some traditionally religious, some religiously unaffiliated — are increasingly communing spiritually through virtual reality. Around the world, people are also able to experience sites sacred to Hinduism, Buddhism and other faiths through 360-degree videos, virtual maps and 3D temples.

Experience Makkah uses 3D modeling to let users circle around the Kaaba building, meet praying pilgrims dressed in white terrycloth garments, learn about rituals and explore other significant landmarks. They include Mount Arafat, the nearby desert hill where the Prophet Muhammad delivered his final sermon nearly 1,400 years ago.

This immersive VR experience was launched in 2015 but became most popular when it was updated in 2020, said Ehab Fares, chief executive of the digital agency BSocial, which created Experience Makkah.

During that first pandemic year, the hajj pilgrimage — which drew about 2.5 million people a year earlier — was limited to as few as 1,000 already residing in Saudi Arabia because of restrictions to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

The Sistine Chapel reopened to the public in early 2021 after closing the previous November due to the pandemic. But even while in-person access was shut off, Michelangelo’s breathtaking frescoes could be experienced through a virtual tour on the Vatican’s website.

Faith-based VR projects are also making inroads in academia.

This spring at the University of Miami, students strapped on VR headsets to watch 360-degree videos of a Haitian Voodoo ceremony, a Hindu funeral rite and a Christian baptism. They explored Barcelona’s Sagrada Family Basilica, the Parthenon in Athens and Mecca for a course called Religion and Sacred Spaces in the Era of Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence.