The Mandela Robben Island Experience

Through help of the Mandela Family, RYOT gained unprecedented access to Nelson Mandela’s Robben Island Cell in Cape Town, South Africa. After 4 hours of LiDAR scans and thousands of high-res photos, RYOT created a full 1:1 photogrammetry duplicate of the place where Nelson Mandela spent decades of his life.

This museum quality 6DoF experience had two main components; a physical space designed as an exact, 1:1 scale replica of the Robben Island cell where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of the 27 years he was incarcerated, as well as a best-in-class VR experience with interactive sound design.

Viewers entered the cell, donned a VR headset, and were immersed in a multi-layered, spatial audio soundscape that changed based on where the viewer stood or moved inside the cell.

While a user listened to archival audio from the great freedom fighters like Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela who battled 50 years of Apartheid, the environment provided a tactile, visceral connection to the physical world that defined Mandela’s imprisonment by placing to-scale physical objects in the cell in order to transcend the boundary between real and virtual