Peter Arens, head of ZDF’s editorial department for culture, history and science: „For more than 33 years, our successful documentation brand Terra X has transported the audience to the most exotic places in the world, allowing the audience to immerse itself into the past or experience animals up-close. By utilizing virtual reality we can even go one step further: our audience can finally have a firsthand experience“.

With complex 3D reconstructions created by Faber Courtial Digital Productions, the Terra X series impressed audiences with hitherto unreachable places or historical events. “Volcanoes in 3D and 360 degrees” is breaking new ground as ZDF and Faber Courtial are now putting viewers in the middle of the action.

Never before could one experience erupting volcanoes in such intensity and immersion.The impression is enhanced by not only giving the viewer the freedom to look all around him/her, the experience itself is also stereoscopic (3D).

Jörg Courtial, FaberCourtial: „We are taking full advantage of virtual reality, which results in an extremely authentic experience. We could not achieve this by using only conventional 360 degree video. Our volcanoes have been photo realistically and three-dimensionally created in 3DS MAX. Therefore we didn’t have stitching problems and were able to achieve a higher render quality than would be possible with standard game engines. All our projects are always based on a three-dimensional environment model. The final film is a composition with real actors. We will transfer this technique to virtual reality with our next vr-project.“