Guided VR tour in Milan helps visitors experience climate change first-hand

An innovative way to augment the surrounding reality and look beyond our current context

The Indro Montanelli Public Gardens in Milan have been enhanced in an unprecedented way, and all of this not through major public landscaping works but only with the addition of VR goggles and a guide. Welcome to R-evolution Park – an immersive experience for all ages where visitors get to discover the natural history of the planet but also the damaging impact of climate change all with the help of virtual reality.

The immersive journey between virtual reality and the live experience was created with the scientific partnership of the WWF, with the patronage of the Municipality of Milan. The aim is to awe, to entertain but also to educate and inspire a sustainable mindset through a fusion of natural surroundings and digital technology.

Visualization of problems makes them easier to understand

Upon arriving for the tour, each visitor receives a VR set and gets to follow an expert guide. The tour then crosses the park, located in the Porta Venezia district, promising to transform that place into the most incredible, spectacular and immersive experience on Planet Earth.

The duration of the tour is one hour and a half and takes place on weekends. From the birth of life to the appearance of man, to the theme of sustainability, to proper visualization of the risks and challenges that our planet is facing – these are the stages that the participants will get to experience.

When asked how he came up with the idea, Pier Francesco Jelmoni, the co-founder of Way Experience, one of the companies making the R-evolution Park experience possible, explained for Mitomorrow: “It was a pre-pandemic idea. We were at a conference on the evolution of the planet, where an Italian scientist working in Sweden spoke about the objectives of the 2030 Agenda, underlining how the distance between what we know we have to do to achieve them and the ways in which politics is looking to obtain them is immense.”

And politics reflects people’s understanding and perspectives on the ground. Most people, understandably, lack a panoramic and long-term grasp of how the environment on Earth has been changed through centuries of human interaction. This is where R-evolution Park comes as an idea that can help visualize that in an easy-to-understand form.