Mastaba
Overview
A VR fundraising experience for the Mastaba — Christo and Jeanne-Claude's monumental unbuilt work: more than 500,000 oil barrels arranged in a trapezoidal prism stretching over 400 meters per side and rising more than 200 meters into the sky. Built to present the project to potential diplomatic backers in the Middle East.
About the Project
The Mastaba is one of the great unrealized monuments of contemporary art — conceived by Christo and Jeanne-Claude to be permanently erected in the UAE. To advance that vision, the estate and studio Dirt Empire asked Agile Lens to create a VR experience that could place diplomats inside the scale of the work in a way no photograph or rendering ever could. The technical challenge was acute: rendering an object of hundreds of meters on a side, composed of half a million individual oil barrels, crisply and in real time on a standalone headset with no Wi-Fi. Agile Lens developed custom procedural mesh generation techniques, purpose-built asset optimization pipelines, and 360 environment frameworks to make it work — and the result runs fully offline, reliable in any meeting room anywhere in the Middle East.