A few days ago I entered the metaverse. But I didn’t have Meta’s viewers. And I wasn’t even in front of a Google booth. Silicon Valley has nothing to do with it this time. I was in Rome, in a small twelve-seater electric bus that moved slowly around the Imperial Forums.
As the bus progressed, very powerful 8k screens positioned in place of the windows recreated in real time the images of Ancient Rome: the Colosseum, the Circus Maximus, but also the houses that were around it; there were even the smells of the time that varied from one area to another, and an immersive sound system which, together, gave the feeling of really being there, two thousand years ago.
Every now and then the screens came back transparent and we could see the majestic ruins in the city traffic having however understood their history better. “Rome was more beautiful before,” my son exclaimed at one point. I don’t know if it’s true, but I know that we had finally seen ancient Rome, no longer just imagined. The project is the work of a startup that has brought together some of the greatest virtual and augmented reality talents in our country; added Mov-X, a noteworthy patent that allows images to be adapted to the movement of the bus; and convinced the entrepreneurial courage of some small, courageous investors. It’s called Invisible Cities and was launched last June.
As I said we weren’t in Silicon Valley but if Invisible Cities had been born there now it would have the line of investors to try to bring this solution to all the cities of the world with a long history and change the way of telling them. For now the Virtual Bus is limited to having the queue of tourists to get on board, but it would be a shame to waste this opportunity to do a great thing.
