Virtual reality has explored many genres till now, starting from high tech games to commercial purposes but there is one use case utterly unique and even more intriguing. Virtual Reality’s latest point of interest has been to allow the Bhakts in India to peer through the religious temples during the prestigious Ujjain Kumbh Mela.
In a village named Ushapur 80 km from Ujjain, devotees could be seen in small stalls with their hands folded peering through the VR headsets during a 360 degree 3D Darshan of the very esteemed Mahakaal Temple.
The man behind this great endeavor and co-founder of Twist Mobile, Virat Kuthal has been exploring the possibilities of VR beyond gaming by developing immersive VR content of various temples and other Indian religious places. The team behind the effort took six months to shoot the Mahakaal Temple in 360 degree with an aim to let for over 70 million devotees visit the religious temple as not everyone is able to visit the inside of the temple due to the immensely large crowd of followers.
The team had to take special permissions from the Temple’s management to shoot for the video and in the course also created its very own OpenGL 360 degree video player. Now, the team has put in all its efforts to set up around 20 stalls during the Kumbh Mela with over 5,000 Google Cardboards and 2 Oculus Rift VR Headsets to let the followers pay their homage to the almighty.
