As night falls in Paris, the Dôme des Invalides comes alive thanks to a dazzling new exhibit: AURA Invalides. Designed by Moment Factory, this immersive experience combines video mapping, lighting, special effects, orchestral music, and sound design to celebrate the architectural and historical heritage of one of Paris’s most iconic monuments.
The project was initiated in 2019 by cultural operator Cultival, which was then seeking innovative cultural and tourism offerings designed to create new sustainable attractions in France. Captivated by the AURA experience at Basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal, and Moment Factory’s peerless creativity and ability to meet exacting standards, Cultival asked the multimedia studio to create the very first AURA experience in France. Les Invalides, whose gilded dome has brightened the Paris skyline for centuries, was the natural choice. To achieve this project, Cultival also turned to its longstanding partner, Musée de l’Armée – Hôtel national des Invalides.
Over a 50-minute span, visitors are invited to partake in a sensory nighttime exploration. Guided by light, they wander through Dôme des Invalides and its six chapels, where the previously unseen gradually comes into view. As visitors pursue their exploration, they become attuned to their surroundings and the marvelous aura on display. The immersive AURA experience consists of three acts, each portraying a distinct facet of this particular landmark: its construction, the memories it harbors, and its power to inspire one and all.
Dôme des Invalides provides one of the most ambitious projection surfaces that Moment Factory has ever had to work with. The technical challenge was enormous. At more than 90 meters high, the building is topped by a dome whose smallest diameter is 30 meters. In all, more than 45 million pixels were mapped onto a 3,500-square-metre surface.
One of the building’s distinctive features is a reverberation time that spans nearly 10 seconds, a result of its architectural configuration. To ensure that AURA Invalides visitors can fully experience the orchestral score, the team employed a sound-spatializing technique that involves localizing sound with utmost precision. As a result, visitors can clearly perceive where the sound emanates from. The experience combines sound and image to create a 360-degree immersion effect, making visitors feel as if they are fully immersed in the show.
Another major challenge was to blend technology seamlessly into this space so as to create a truly magical effect. In fact, since Dôme des Invalides is a protected historic monument, the projection equipment had to be installed on the existing structure without altering the site’s architectural integrity.
To that end, the technical team produced a drone-enabled architectural scan, which it then transcribed into virtual reality, in the form of a 3D model, to produce a technical design that encompassed all of the site’s specific features. Throughout this delicate stage (from design to implementation), the firm’s collaboration with Direction régionale des affaires culturelles (DRAC) – whose role is to protect the building’s integrity – was particularly invaluable.
When the team at Moment Factory embarked on this ambitious project, above all it wanted to pay tribute to the genius of Jules Hardouin-Mansart, and the talent of the architects, artists, and craftsmen who created Dôme des Invalides so that today’s visitors may discover, or rediscover, this exceptional French heritage site in a whole new way.
The team’s artistic preference was to reveal the spirit of the place, comprising its architectural beauty, the memory with which it resonates, and the symbolism it conveys. Accordingly, each scene in the experience is based on existing documents. After extensive historical research, the creative team worked closely with chief curators at Musée de l’Armée to ensure that the design was historically accurate.
AURA Invalides seeks to reveal and share, rather than to tell. While the creative team drew its narrative inspiration from the site’s diverse history, it created an immersive world designed to spark visitors’ imagination. By instilling a sense of wonder, the intangible and invisible are revealed.
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