Landlubbers living in the 21st Century now can take a good look around the Titanic, thanks to a virtual-reality experience inside an International Drive attraction.
Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition has introduced an add-on VR activity to its walk-through display with relics and reproductions tied to the ship that famously sank in 1912.
At the I-Drive attraction, visitors wear a headset to look up, down and around at a re-creation of what passengers would have seen while on board. That can include newfangled-for-the-times tile flooring or a passing iceberg.
“It’s like a 360 view, so everywhere you look, you can see something,” says Ross Mumford, general manager of Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition. “You get to really see what we don’t have any film for because this is such a great, accurate depiction of the ship.”
The 12-minute presentation includes glimpses at the gangway doors, first-class lounge, Turkish baths, grand staircase and below deck into the third class common area. Viewers also go up into the crow’s nest – the lookouts’ point of view – and into the lifeboats.
A VR experience at Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition includes a look at the first-class lounge of the ship. (E/M Group and RMS Titanic Inc.)
It’s not just about the ship’s look and architecture. VR users see passengers and crew on board, too.
“One of the hardest things to re-create digitally, sometimes, is people,” says Matthew DeWinkeleer, producer with “Titanic: Honor and Glory,” a videogame project.
“We have some background people in period dress, appropriate for Titanic, appropriate for the Edwardian age, walking around on deck, sitting playing, playing cards in the smoking room. … We have some people washing the deck, sailors washing the deck that they would do every day.”
“We even have a couple of rats in third class,” DeWinkeleer says.
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RMS Titanic Inc. and E/M Group, which operate the Orlando attraction, hired the makers of “Titanic: Honor and Glory,” to create the new in-house experience.
The VR experience features a narrator as a guide with information that enhances the real-life walk-through experience.
“It points out some different items that are connected to artifacts that we’ve recovered. So you can see them in context,” Mumford says.
The tools for virtual-reality re-creation already exist, so the difficult part is getting the Titanic details right, DeWinkeleer says.
“We were relying on only primary source material from 1912 from the construction of Titanic, photographs,” he says. “The hardest part is that Titanic, although she’s now one of the world’s most famous ships, she was not well-documented since it was her first voyage. … And then she’s taken all the information down with her.”
Plan B includes studying other ships built in the same yard and wreckage analysis. That includes information from Olympic, the nearly identical sister ship that was built side-by-side with Titanic at the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
“We have to put the pieces together to rebuild our Titanic,” DeWinkeleer says.
Artifacts from the ship have helped clarify elements, including color issues, Mumford says. The stained glass of the smoking room had had a red hue based on the Olympic, but was changed to yellow based on Titanic artifacts.
The VR film tries to emulate the lighting of 1912, too, DeWinkeleer says.
“Back then, light bulbs were a lot warmer in color, but also dimmer at the same time,” he says. “So if you’re exploring inside the ship at nighttime, it’s going to be quite dim.”
Visitors interested in the VR option generally participate before the walk-through portion. A room with seating off the lobby is dedicated for the virtual reality experience. Several areas of the ship are explored on the guided tour.
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The VR segment is $8 atop general admission fees ($5 if booked online in advance). General admission is $37.36 ($30.94 for ages 4-12). There is a discounted rate of $33.08 for Florida residents, students, members of the military and visitors age 65 and older.
The longtime I-Drive attraction includes full-scale room recreations of the ship and galleries feature the first-class area, a cafe and the grand staircase. It holds almost 200 artifacts that were recovered from the wreck site. The finale includes a 2-ton section of the ship’s hull dubbed “The Little Piece.”
For tickets or more information, go to RMSTitanicInc.com.