Explore the Grandeur of Versailles Palace from Home with Virtual Reality!

The Palace of Versailles has embraced a groundbreaking technological advancement. Starting March 25, 2025, it offers a unique virtual reality experience titled The Lost Gardens of the Sun King, designed to immerse visitors in the 17th-century gardens as they were envisioned during the reign of Louis XIV.

Tour Guided by André Le Nôtre Himself

In collaboration with Gedeon Experiences, Small Creative, and Vive Arts, this project aims to enhance the appreciation of cultural heritage through digital means. The audience is invited to rediscover spaces that have been lost for centuries, recreated with historical accuracy.

The journey begins by donning a virtual reality headset, allowing visitors to stroll through the Versailles gardens as they existed in 1682, led by André Le Nôtre, the renowned gardener of the Sun King. Technically, visitors will use HTC’s VIVE Focus Vision VR headsets. The goal is to provide a collective and interactive virtual reality (VR) location-based experience (LBE) of these vanished sites, offering a close look at this lesser-known aspect of French royal history and the legacy of Louis XIV. The project is co-produced by VIVE Arts with GEDEON Experiences, Small Creative, and the Palace of Versailles.

A Faithful Reconstruction Supported by Research

To make this immersion credible and historically accurate, the creators relied on archives, expert testimonies, and archaeological remains. The aim is to provide visitors with a reconstruction as accurate as possible of these iconic spaces, from the earliest gardens of the Palace of Versailles to its zenith in 1682.

This initiative also targets a younger audience, often detached from traditional cultural heritage circuits. As Stéphane Millière, president of Gedeon, points out, a previous VR experience conducted at the Musée d’Orsay showed that 32% of the participants had never visited a museum before!