Our Work
A digital ecosystem for the birthplace of Saudi Arabia
Client
Location
Sector
Collaborators
Outernet London
Services Provided
Digital Twin
Luna
Animation & Film
Visualization
Diriyah, Riyadh, is the birthplace of the first Saudi state and a UNESCO World Heritage Site renowned for its Najdi architecture, now reimagined as a global cultural destination.
To connect with a global audience, Diriyah Company activated Outernet in London – Europe’s largest immersive venue.
Diriyah, just west of Riyadh, is the birthplace of the first Saudi state and a UNESCO World Heritage Site renowned for its Najdi architecture, now reimagined as a global cultural destination.
To connect with a global audience, Diriyah Company activated Outernet in London – Europe’s largest immersive venue.
VMI helped tell the future story of Diriyah in the ‘Now Trending’ zone, with a set of four ‘portals’ into the residences, retail, commercial offices and hospitality destinations of this emerging metropolis, along with a panoramic immersive film for visitors to marvel at the scope of this historic city’s reinvention.
Diriyah Company has activated Outernet London for three consecutive years, drawing an estimated three million visitors. The scope of this event was no different – visitors were invited to experience Saudi Arabian culture and hospitality firsthand, with traditional dance and music, dates and coffee and Arabic calligraphy; bringing the buzzing central London venue to life.
To complement this headline cultural expression and match its scale, we were tasked with creating an immersive showcase of ‘The City of Earth’ inside Outernet’s Now Trending zone.
The space evoked a traditional Saudi Arabian majlis (sitting place),
with a central seating concourse flanked by four immersive portals
that guided guests through various facets of life in Diriyah.
Our immersive film showcased Diriyah’s urban masterplan,
translating the scale and complexity of a new city into a cinematic experience
for a public audience.
The film brings together the four main asset classes of the masterplan — retail, hospitality, residences, and commercial offices — to help viewers understand Diriyah as a place composed of 12+ interconnected districts, each contributing to a new vision for living in Saudi Arabia.
Beginning with a global perspective, the film gradually draws the audience closer to Saudi Arabia, then to Diriyah, and finally to the human scale of the city. This journey highlights key themes such as nature-led planning, human-centred design, Najdi architecture, and cultural heritage, grounding the masterplan’s ambition in tangible, experiential qualities.
Showcased at Outernet London, the immersive format transformed the masterplan into an emotional and spatial narrative, allowing audiences to intuitively grasp the vision, scale, and values behind Diriyah.
Buzzing from the qahwa (Saudi Arabian coffee), visitors move into a little retail therapy, exploring downtown shopping at Diriyah, immersing them in the atmosphere of the city’s 400 luxury brands. The entire scene is rendered at full scale and interacted with via coded gesture control of guests waving.
The shopping district will host more than retail, with a range of entertainment and cultural developments, including the 20,000-seat Diriyah Arena, the Royal Diriyah Opera House, and nine museums, such as the ‘Asaan’ Misk Heritage Museum by Zaha Hadid Architects, as well as Diriyah Art Futures, for the Ministry of Culture.
The hotels and resorts portal introduces a range of refined hospitality inspired by At-Turaif, with interior renders and atmospheric soundscapes setting the scene. At each portal, floor sensors detect the visitor’s presence, initiating the process, and then allow the visitor to navigate through sequences using simple hand gestures.
Diriyah’s hospitality precinct is vast, with nearly 40 hotels planned, including iconic names such as The Ritz-Carlton and Four Seasons, with more than 5,000 rooms across the district.
The residences portal immerses visitors in neighbourhoods shaped by traditional Najdi design, reflected in the UNESCO World Heritage Site at the district’s core, where thick earth walls, shaded courtyards, and narrow walkable streets create cool, private homes adapted to the Saudi Arabian climate.
We rendered this world in fine detail, from the way light falls into courtyards to residents chatting in their cool porches, the local flora shifting in the breeze, and even the physics of rushing water from the district’s many fountains. The overall effect makes this developing neighbourhood feel uncannily alive.
But it is not all play in Diriyah, as the commercial portal opens into a working district. Visitors step into Najdi-inspired office spaces. The company’s planning approach is focused on low-rise, human-centric architecture that meets the modern demands of smart infrastructure and sustainable design.
Animated scenes reveal a professional community in motion, with meetings taking place in shaded courtyards, conversations unfolding along leafy walkways, and buzzing modern workspaces, all set against Diriyah’s cultural backdrop.
All this will be connected by four Riyadh Metro stations, putting the city centre about 15 minutes away, the airport about 25 minutes away, and placing the working people of Diriyah within an eight-hour flight of 70% of the world’s population.
These experiences matter because of the results they deliver, and at Outernet, we made that impact visible by building feedback directly into the experience.
Tablets throughout the spaces captured visitor responses and sentiments, to demonstrate why events like this are vital in a development’s lifecycle. By collecting this interaction data, we gave Diriyah Company a clear picture of what resonated, how people engaged, and where future activations can be refined.
This installation forms part of our ongoing creative partnership with Diriyah Company, visualising the transformation of Saudi Arabia’s birthplace into a world-class cultural capital aligned with Vision 2030.
Learn more here.
3m
Visitors across Diriyah’s London activations
87.71k
Now Trending visitor impressions
432 Seconds
Dwell time 112.8% above Outernet avg.
9.25k
Daily visitors
$18.6 billion
Diriyah’s estimated contribution to the Saudi Arabian national economy
50m
Estimated annual visits to Diriyah
— Jerry Inzerillo, Group Chief Executive Officer of Diriyah Company.