Some people fly in their dreams. Yet, what would the real experience of flying feel like? Through Virtual Reality, we enabled everybody to explore the historic city of Ulm in 1890 from a bird’s perspective with the minster of Ulm – a cathedral 500 years in the making – at the heart of our experience. For this purpose, our concept, 3D design and engineering team became deeply acquainted with the city of Ulm and the physics of flying as such.

By designing a 3D world for the Birdly flight simulator, we created the world's first realistic and immersive 3D flight experience with a game level complexity. The user is able to intuitively and naturally control speed and direction by flapping and positioning the hardware’s wings. Flawless real-time rendering, three-dimensional binaural sound and real flight wind turn the VR experience into a spectacular immersive trip through time, leaving visitors overwhelmed and thrilled by this unique feeling.

In order to recreate the historical city as realistic and compelling as possible, we focused on a high level of detail that shaped the historic townscape. We modeled, textured and placed around 2.000 historical buildings and 6.000 additional objects. With eight-Million pixels in total, an area of 1.500.000 m2 to explore, 500 hours of 3D-Design and 100 hours of testing, we brought the historic city of Ulm back to life.

The permanent installation opened in July 2017, welcoming more than two thousand people of all ages each month. Each and everyone of them experiencing their very own dream of flying. Located in the very center of Ulm, next to the Ulm Minster, the installation is placed within a showroom, setting the stage for a historic context of the experience. Ulm Stories is a great example for a modern approach to urban marketing, making a historic site to become alive. The application received great attention and seven-figure media coverage by a wide reach of both key and specialist media, among others SWR and ZEIT.