Cherbourg Transatlantique — La Cité de la Mer

La Cité de la Mer Cherbourg-en-Cotentin

Listed on the supplementary register of historic monuments, Cherbourg’s Transatlantic Ferry Terminal is the last of its kind in Europe to have retained its Art Deco architecture. Originally opened to welcome wealthy travellers and migrants in the finest possible conditions, it weathered the passage of time before being saved in 1989 thanks to the La Cité de la Mer project.

Since 18 April 2025, within the former train hall of this extraordinary station, visitors are invited to travel back in time to relive the excitement of a unique historic day: the Queen Mary’s first docking at the quay on 14 April 1937.

Find out more: https://www.citedelamer.com

The experience:

An immersive, free-roaming experience: equipped with a Meta Quest Pro / Quest 3 mixed-reality headset, visitors are free to explore the Grande Halle of the Gare Maritime for 35 minutes. Thanks to high-resolution colour passthrough, the monument’s real-world space is populated in real time with life-size transatlantic trains, boarding platforms, luggage trolleys and the signs of major shipping companies bound for New York, Southampton or Le Havre. Visitors set their own pace, approach the characters and explore the details of an environment recreated with documentary precision.

Historical figures within sight: a dozen characters inhabit the hall — the station’s architect and interior designer, a porter, members of a jazz band, a shipping company employee, and travellers eager to discover the Queen Mary. Each character has been fully modelled in 3D, rigged, animated and dressed in the fashion of the 1930s, with attention paid to expressions, gestures and costume details that make every encounter believable and lifelike. The walking and gestural animations have been crafted so that each character exists in the space as a fully-fledged presence, rather than a mere hologram.

A bespoke hybrid technical architecture: faced with the challenges of a 280-metre hall, complex spaces, reflective materials and the absence of any pre-existing digital infrastructure, standard tracking systems proved ineffective. Anamnesia has developed a fully bespoke indoor positioning system, combining the headsets’ native inside-out tracking for real-time head and hand tracking, a proprietary spatial registration layer that continuously anchors the visitor’s position within the hall’s overall map, and a network of invisible anchor points distributed throughout the space, enabling the headset to reposition itself precisely at each key narrative zone along the route. This system guarantees centimetre-level accuracy of the overlaid 3D content, regardless of the visitor’s position, for groups experiencing the exhibition simultaneously.

A complete 3D reconstruction of a day in 1937: the hall is recreated exactly as it was at its inauguration in 1933 — with period furniture, Art Deco décor in its original state, and natural light filtering through the large glass roofs. Visitors simultaneously experience the monument’s actual space and its reconstructed version in its former splendour, two layers of time superimposed in a single view. The narrative climax of the experience is the Queen Mary’s first call at Cherbourg on 14 April 1937: its silhouette, its presence at the quay and the excitement it generates among the crowd are brought to life through a 3D and audio presentation that makes this moment the high point of a vivid historical narrative.