Immersive Pompeii exhibition brings ancient city to life in London

A new London exhibition resurrects Pompeii with virtual volcanoes, 3D replicas of plaster casts, and a metaverse tour that places visitors inside the ancient city’s final moments.

London is bringing the ancient Roman city of Pompeii back to life through a sweeping new immersive exhibition that blends archaeology, digital recreation and dramatic storytelling. “The Last Days of Pompeii”, opening on Friday at Immerse LDN, offers a multi-sensory journey into the world destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

Visitors enter a space where volcanic flames, fireballs and collapsing buildings are projected across giant screens. One of the main attractions is a 25-minute immersive film that surrounds the audience with the sights and sounds of Vesuvius erupting, reimagined through advanced 3D technology. Executive producer Jordi Sellas says the aim is to make visitors feel as though they are inside Pompeii at the moment of the catastrophe.

Sellas explains that the exhibition also features an excavation room designed to turn every visitor into an archaeologist. This interactive space reflects the experience of uncovering Pompeii's history piece by piece, highlighting how fiction and historical reality intersect when researchers, writers and scriptwriters reconstruct the ancient past.

A key component of the exhibition is the virtual reality tour of the Villa of the Mysteries, one of Pompeii’s most iconic suburban villas. Using VR headsets, visitors walk through digitally recreated baths, kitchens and ceremonial rooms in a metaverse environment, exploring the house as it would have looked moments before the eruption. These scenes were developed in collaboration with Madrid Artes Digitales, which provided the visual recreations used in the metaverse experience.

The exhibition also presents objects that illustrate daily life in Pompeii. A broken figure of Diana the Huntress is displayed alongside a replica head of a Roman sculpture, Roman military armour, and a replica of a tablet recovered from the site. Curator Miriam Huescar Lopez says the original plan was to work directly with the Pompeii Archaeological Park, but transporting sensitive artefacts such as the recovered plaster casts of victims proved too difficult. For security reasons, the team chose to create detailed 3D-printed replicas of the casts, allowing visitors to understand their significance without risking damage to the originals.

Throughout the halls, digital screens reimagine Pompeii’s streets, markets and public squares, showing how the city might have looked before the eruption. Scenes of lava, lightning and ash clouds build toward the disaster that buried the town, while footage of today’s ruins appears alongside immersive projections to show the contrast between past and present.

Footage from Pompeii itself, including tourists photographing plaster casts stored on-site and walking through the ancient streets with Mount Vesuvius looming in the background, reinforces the lasting fascination with the city’s story.

Sellas says the exhibition is ultimately about the relationship between imagination and evidence, and how modern technology can reconnect audiences with a past that is both familiar and newly revealed through ongoing archaeological work.

“The Last Days of Pompeii” will run at London’s Immerse LDN arena until March 2026.

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