Visit The Shining's Overlook Hotel in Virtual Reality

Since its release in 1980, fans of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining have obsessed over every detail of the movie, trying to find hidden meanings throughout the hallways and guestrooms of the fictional Overlook Hotel. Now Claire Hentschker, a digital artist and graduate student from Carnegie Mellon University, is letting fans explore the spooky space for themselves with the creation of a 360-degree virtual reality experience called “Shining360.”

Hentschker used a process called photogrammetry to survey and map the physical space and objects of the Overlook Hotel and extracted film stills throughout The Shining. She then stitched together fragments and 3D elements and mapped the original camera’s movement to make an immersive 360-degree YouTube video that gives viewers a detailed look at Kubrick's creation.

“On a purely technical level, Kubrick’s extensive use of the Steadicam and the film’s signature long tracking shots work exceptionally well with photogrammetry,” Hentschker tells mental_floss. “In terms of cultural impact, The Shining is a cult classic, one of the most iterated films of all time. My hope was that people would have a vested interest in experiencing familiar scenes from the film in this new, fragmented way … VR is a fantastic way of looking both forward and backward in time.”

“Shining360” is currently playing at the MUTEK VR Salon in Montreal, Canada. If you don’t have a VR headset or Google Cardboard, the video is playable in Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera internet browsers.

[h/t Open Culture]