Today (20 December), the world’s largest winter festival opens its virtual doors to the public to experience Christmas festivities – all in a Minecraft world.
Covering an area with a representative size of over 155,000 square metres or 38 acres, the virtual wonderland is four times the size of the biggest real-world seasonal event in Austria and took specialist artist Ushio Tokura over 300 hours and more than 30 million individual blocks to complete.
Commissioned by NVIDIA, the NVIDIA RTX Winter World will give families across the globe a free festive immersive experience to explore, which exceeds its real-world counterparts in scale, that visitors can enjoy from the comfort of their own homes. It will also offer an opportunity to raise funds for NVIDIA’s charity partner, Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity.
Utilising NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), real-time ray tracing simulates the physical behaviour of light, enabling reflections, shadows and other realistic lighting effects, as visitors are transported to a world offering a full winter wonderland and Santa’s grotto experience.
The world includes roller coasters, a Christmas village, frozen ice-skating lake, penguin postal service and petting zoo tent, with playable storylines and quests. Christmas film aficionados should also keep a lookout for Easter Egg homages to famous festive flicks such as Elf, It’s A Wonderful Life and The Polar Express.
The world also features a full recreation of the Great Ormond Street Hospital building and visitors will be able to donate via an in-game QR code to contribute to the charity’s ‘Home for Christmas’ fundraising campaign, which seeks to bring seriously ill children one step closer to home.
“We’re thrilled to be partnering with NVIDIA who have created this amazing experience for families across the world,” commented Liz Tait, director of fundraising at GOSH Charity. “We are so grateful for any donation’s visitors to this incredibly festive winter wonderland, and those joining the charity stream, are able to make.”
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