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Time Travel: High-Tech Exhibition Shows Rebuilding of Notre Dame Cathedral

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Inwood is hosting a historically accurate augmented reality exhibition about the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris through Jan. 31st. The 800 year old cathedral in Paris is reopening after a devastating fire five years ago. Catch this riveting exhibit before its next stop in Melbourne, Australia.

Inwood /
| 15 Nov 2024 | 03:03
    Left to right: Édouard Lussan, co-founder and production director of Histovery; Asia Laird, managing director of Histovery U.S.; and the Very Rev. Patrick Malloy, dean of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.
    Left to right: Édouard Lussan, co-founder and production director of Histovery; Asia Laird, managing director of Histovery U.S.; and the Very Rev. Patrick Malloy, dean of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. ( Alex Dolansky)
    Photo of a previous Notre-Dame Augmented Experience exhibit, featuring Histovery’s “HistoPad” AR tablets. The photo features a painting of Napoleon’s coronation, which co-founder Lussan said turned out to be highly inaccurate as they attempted to virtually reconstruct the scene.
    Photo of a previous Notre-Dame Augmented Experience exhibit, featuring Histovery’s “HistoPad” AR tablets. The photo features a painting of Napoleon’s coronation, which co-founder Lussan said turned out to be highly inaccurate as they attempted to virtually reconstruct the scene. ( Histovery)
    Part of the Notre-Dame Augmented Experience exhibit at St. John the Divine.
    Part of the Notre-Dame Augmented Experience exhibit at St. John the Divine. ( Alex Dolansky)
    The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine.
    The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine. ( Photo: Alex Dolansky)
    The Notre-Dame Cathedral (taken a year before the fire that closed it to the public).
    The Notre-Dame Cathedral (taken a year before the fire that closed it to the public). ( Alex Dolansky)

New Yorkers can travel over 3,600 miles and nearly 1,000 years into the past by visiting Notre-Dame de Paris: The Augmented Exhibition at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, between November 15th and January 31st.

The traveling exhibition—which features cutting-edge augmented reality (rendered in the same engine as the popular video game Fortnite) and 3D models of the cathedral designed and produced by Histovery, a French educational technology startup, in collaboration with L'Oréal Groupe—allows participants to view the history of the Notre-Dame cathedral, from the time of the church’s construction to key moments in the cathedral’s 850 year history, up to the 2019 fire that forced the building to close down. Tickets are $25 for adults, $22 for seniors, $20 for students, and $10 for children.

“For us to have this exhibit here—there are many reasons why this is so appropriate. We are the largest cathedral in the world, and a gothic cathedral at that,” said the Very Reverend Patrick Malloy, the dean of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine.

“We also, interestingly enough, had a fire the day before the Notre Dame fire,” he added. “At this very moment, we are finally, finally, after five years, finishing the cleanup from that fire.” (The Notre-Dame Cathedral, which has been closed since 2019, will reopen on Dec 8th.)

“This is extra special,” said Asia Laird, managing director of Histovery U.S., about the exhibit. “It’s been seen by over a million people worldwide. This is the first time it’s going to be in a chapel, and that’s very special. And this is the first time that it’s open during the reopening of Notre-Dame...and so no better place than New York, and no better place than St. John the Divine, to celebrate this important moment.”

Édouard Lussan, Histovery’s co-founder and director of production, said that every detail in the exhibition—from the clothing depicted in the graphics, to the Cathedral's building materials and its construction process, to the colors of the stained glass windows at different periods—was carefully considered, so as to maximize historical accuracy.

“We are not messing with history,” he said.

For example, the portion about the Notre-Dame fire (which is a visual reconstruction of the Cathedral and the surrounding fire trucks that changes depending on which hour of the fire you choose to view) was created with consultation from the Parisian Fire Department.

“The firefighter was behind our developer saying that the water was exactly at this part,” Lussan said, pointing to a part of the graphic on the “HistoPad” tablet device where a fire truck could be seen shooting water at the Cathedral. Even the smoke coming off of the fire, Lussan added, blows in the same direction it blew during the fire, based on where the wind was blowing at that particular time on that day.

“We wanted to create something to show to the public Notre Dame as it has never been shown before,” said Lussan. “Because the cathedral was closed, it was under construction, you couldn’t go in. So was there any specific way to present it to the audience? This is the answer, right?”

Lussan said that what he’s most proud of is that fact that the exhibit is accessible to people of all ages.

“This exhibition is really for everyone,” Laird said. “It’s for tech enthusiasts, it’s for history buffs...for that family member that’s seen everything, bring them here to see this! They’re going to love it.”

While the Notre-Dame exhibition will continue to travel after it ends its run in New York—Melbourne, Australia, is its next stop — Histovery is working on another AR exhibition, about the American Revolution, that will come out around the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Histovery was created in 2013. It’s currently available at the Alamo in the United States, fifteen institutions in France, and two sites in Germany.