Birdly - The Dream of Flying

The Birdly flight simulator provides a unique virtual reality experience in the southern German city of Ulm: a fascinating experience, breathtaking and yet meditative. To access its world you have to lie on the man-sized unit, put on the 3D glasses and stretch your arms out to the side. The simulator then detects your arm movements like the flapping of a bird’s wings. You can soar over the rooftops and along the street canyons that appear in the headset by moving your arms up and down. Prototypes of Birdly have been on show at a few locations to date, such as New York or Bangalore (India). The new and unique feature at the Ulm exhibition is the elaborately designed virtual reality environment. Before this, Birdly had just shown a simulation of Manhattan, which was based on a grid model. For the Ulm environment, in contrast, it was individually programmed, house by house, brick by brick. This resulted in a detailed framework of 2,000 buildings and 6,000 other objects like trees and animals. However, it is not modern-day Ulm that has been depicted, but rather the historic Ulm of 1890. A significant year for the city on the Danube, as that is when the tower was completed on Ulm Minster - the highest church tower in the world to this day. Another highlight is Bahnhofstrasse 20 which is where the famous physician Albert Einstein was born in 1879. The building no longer exists as it was bombed during the Second World War. The historic setting makes a flight with Birdly like time travel, which feels incredibly real thanks to perfect real-time rendering, three-dimensional spatial sound and wind. Birdly was developed by Swiss firm Somniacs. The concept for Ulm has been created by the Berliner Stiftung Interactive Media Foundation. Hamburg digital agency Demodern was hired for the technical realisation, using a programmer who has previously created worlds for the well-known computer game World of Warcraft. The background noise during the flight was designed by experts, film music specialists Wittmann/Zeitblom. For Ulm (around 120,000 inhabitants) Birdly is an element in its digital agenda. It can be difficult to describe in concrete terms how digitalisation has changed our lives and Ryan society, whereas Birdly brings the potentials of digital technology to life. Visitor info: Birdly will be stationed in Ulm at least until summer 2018. A ticket for a 3-minute flight costs 5 euros, and every visitor is instructed how to use the simulator beforehand. Birdly is open from Tuesday to Saturday from 10am to 6pm and can be found next to Ulm Minster at Kramgasse 3, 89073 Ulm.