Want To Fly Around That Sculpture On The Serpentine?

Tabish Khan
By Tabish Khan Last edited 68 months ago

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Want To Fly Around That Sculpture On The Serpentine?

If you've been to Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens recently, you can't have missed Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Mastaba floating on the Serpentine.

We can only stand by the shore and admire, it or get a little closer to it via pedalo. Wouldn't it be great to fly all around it and look down upon this massive creation? But they won't let us fly a drone in the park and we can't afford a jetpack.

However, we can do the next best thing and recreate that experience in this flypast video, where the Mastaba and the park have been digitally rendered.

It's all to promote the free Acute Art app where users can download and view the experience themselves. To get the full experience requires donning a virtual reality (VR) headset where we can navigate across the lake and get up close to the structure. We've had a go and it's very impressive to steer all around it and the it looks very close to the real thing even up close.

But most of us don't have virtual reality headsets, we hear you cry. That's true and that includes us, but we do have the cheaper cardboard VR, and slotting our phones in lets us look around, even if our journey round it is not as free as the full VR experience.

Even those without any VR headset can experience it by turning a phone in their hands. Make sure to turn the volume up to get the nice touch of ambient birdsong.

The Acute Art app  is free to download for Android and iOS and comes with two artworks, more will arrive in the future. The Mastaba will remain on the Serpentine until 9 September 2018.  

Last Updated 30 July 2018