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Tour the Ghost City of Pripyat in the ‘Chernobyl VR Project’
There are countless ghost towns scattered about this big blue planet, though few have achieved the level of name recognition that Pripyat has today. It will have been two decades next year since the Chernobyl Power Plant went nuclear, literally, claiming the lives of 31 people. That number doesn’t include the many lives that were cut short due to radiation sickness, nor does it mention the hundreds of thousands of lives that were frozen in time when the city was evacuated.
Pripyat has appeared in various movies and video games before, but none have been so focused on capturing it in its entirety. The dedication of its developer is part of what makes the Chernobyl VR Project so exciting. It’s far more ambitious than your average simulator.
Polish developer Farm 51 qualified as a Chernobyl research team to get access to areas of the city that would’ve been otherwise inaccessible to us normies. Their goal is to create an accurate virtual reality experience that lets anyone with a VR headset tour a world that’s inaccessible to most.
It’s coming from the same team that made the horror-themed shooter Necrovision, so haunting visuals should fit comfortably within their wheelhouse. Unlike their previous work, the Chernobyl VR Project relies almost entirely on the tech that’s being used to recreate it.
Light field, photogrammetry and stereoscopic, 360-degree camera technology is a seemingly nonsensical string of words that describes the incredible effort that’s going into this project. It’s advanced stuff, but it’s not entirely new to video games. Photogrammetry, for example, was used by The Astronauts when they were building the near-photorealistic world of Ethan Carter.
The Chernobyl VR Project will support the major VR headsets, including Gear VR, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR. There’s no release date for this just yet, but Farm 51 is expected to show it off for the first time on April 26, the 30th anniversary of the disaster.
All of us here at Bloody Disgusting are deeply saddened to learn that George A. Romero Foundation Founder and President Suzanne Desrocher-Romero has passed away.
GARF shared in a statement on socials, “It is with a heavy heart that we announce the passing of Suzanne Desrocher Romero. Suzanne passed away of natural causes on June 24 at her home in Toronto after a prolonged illness.”
The statement continues, “Suzanne was the fierce leader of the George A. Romero Estate and The George A. Romero Foundation. She worked tirelessly to preserve George’s legacy. Her work at the foundation will continue to inspire and live on for generations to come. The family asks for privacy at this time.”
Desrocher-Romero founded GARF in 2018, after her late husband’s passing in 2017, and has been a fierce advocate for his legacy and the arts. It was her mission to “strengthen horror as a serious field of global study,” and she was a tremendous fighter on behalf of Romero’s works and supporting new filmmakers inspired by his legacy.
It was Desrocher-Romero who spearheaded the recovery and restoration of The Amusement Park, and, as the person in charge of the George A. Romero estate, worked closely with author Daniel Kraus on completing unfinished novels like Pay the Piper and The Living Dead. She most recently celebrated the restoration of her favorite of Romero’s zombie films, Day of the Dead, and was hard at work producing the upcoming film Twilight of the Dead.
That passionate advocacy led to Suzanne Desrocher-Romero becoming family to Bloody Disgusting as well.
2023 marked the start of an ongoing partnership between Bloody FM and GARF on The Dead, a scripted audio series spanning multiple seasons that saw Desrocher-Romero working closely with the Bloody FM team and mentoring the series’s contributing writers with GARF. To say her loss will be felt internally is an understatement.
“Anytime George Romero is mentioned is good, because what we are doing is to provide a healthy legacy. We’re uplifting his legacy, we’re supporting the archive, and we’re also supporting the Horror Study Center. So, all of these three things are what the Foundation is striving to do. As far as I’m concerned, the more we say George Romero’s name, the better it is,” Desrocher-Romero recently told BD.
It’s the perfect encapsulation of her unwavering enthusiasm for supporting Romero’s legacy and the horror genre, and just a glimpse at how much she contributed to preserving it. She is, in short, an inspiration.
We send our deepest condolences to Suzanne Desrocher-Romero’s family, friends, and GARF.
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