The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund’s Ellen DeGeneres Campus in Kinigi, Rwanda, serves as a global hub for gorilla conservation, scientific research, and public education.
Situated on the edge of Volcanoes National Park, the campus was designed to offer visitors meaningful access to the Fossey Fund’s work, beyond the limits of traditional wildlife tourism. Habitat XR was first engaged to support fundraising for the construction of the Ellen DeGeneres Campus by the Ellen Fund.
Following its completion, the studio was commissioned to create a series of immersive experiences forming a core part of the on-site visitor journey.
Direct encounters with mountain gorillas are, by necessity, rare, costly, and tightly regulated. While demand for conservation engagement continues to grow, reliance on physical trekking alone limits access, excludes many audiences, and places sustained pressure on fragile ecosystems.
The campus needed a way to offer a sense of closeness and understanding that did not rely on physical proximity. Our challenge was to produce digitally-led immersive experiences that could bring visitors meaningfully closer to gorillas and the work protecting them.
Habitat XR designed three complementary immersive experiences, each serving a distinct role within the campus visitor journey.
At the centre sits the Irmelin DiCaprio Theatre (funded by Leonardo DiCaprio), a purpose-built, ultra-wide 360-degree immersive cinema designed to create shared, social moments. The 43-metre long panoramic canvas envelops a space capable of accommodating 30 people at a time and delivers content at 25K resolution with 10.2 spatial sound. Together, these elements place groups of people inside the forest environment, surrounding them with the scale, movement, and presence of gorilla life.
Across the campus gardens, Habitat XR developed GorillAR, an augmented reality experience that turns the physical landscape into a virtual silverback trek. Using custom-designed, volcanic-rock–textured iPad cases manufactured specifically for the project, visitors move through the grounds encountering life-sized digital gorillas in situ. The experience allows guests to observe seven distinct gorilla behaviours from feeding to nest-building, offering a guaranteed silverback encounter in guaranteed safety for both people and gorillas.
To support more intimate, individual engagement, Habitat XR also created bespoke VR kiosks designed for permanent museum environments. These stations pair high-fidelity virtual reality experiences with a touchscreen interface, allowing visitors to actively explore gorilla behaviours at close range.
The immersive experiences have become a central part of the Ellen DeGeneres Campus visit, allowing people to form meaningful connections with mountain gorillas without adding a single additional footprint on the mountains they call home. Visitors of all ages and physical abilities are able to engage deeply with gorilla life and conservation work – connections that would otherwise be inaccessible to most.
Since opening in early 2022, the campus has welcomed more than 150,000 visitors from over 150 countries. Each of those visits represents a moment of proximity, understanding, and emotional contact with gorillas, achieved without placing further pressure on real families in the wild, and without requiring costly permits or physical endurance.
Together, these experiences have helped shift how conservation engagement happens on site: replacing scarcity with access, observation with immersion, and momentary encounters with lasting understanding.
“Technology can play a major role in shaping people’s attitudes toward nature, and we’re proud to incorporate some of the most cutting-edge storytelling tools into our new home to help further tell the story of gorillas and our 55 years of conservation work in Rwanda.”
