NEOM is a visionary sustainable destination in northwest Saudi Arabia that aims to set a new global standard in nature-first eco-tourism and regenerative development. With a commitment to protecting 95% of its land and sea for nature, NEOM is building experiences that let people engage with biodiversity, landscapes, and ecosystems in ways that deepen appreciation and stewardship.
Habitat XR created an interactive, high-tech, wildlife-focused installation under the stars situated in a 500-million year old sandstone canyon. The purpose of this project was to commemorate and inform people about the forthcoming Hisma rewilding in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Around the world, conservation is frequently confined to the margins, taking place in areas left untouched by development and constrained by limited resources and competing interests. This model restricts what conservation can achieve and how people experience it.
NEOM presented an opportunity to invert that model. The challenge was not simply to protect land, but to actively revive an ecosystem and invite people to understand its significance through a new kind of conservation experience.
Within Saudi Arabia’s evolving tourism vision, technology plays a critical role in enabling this shift. Immersive and interpretive technologies offer a way to reveal hidden ecological stories, support rewilding and rehabilitation efforts, and help visitors understand landscapes that are in transition. Rather than replacing nature, technology becomes a bridge, making ecological processes visible while preserving sensitive environments.
Habitat XR designed a site-specific, night-time hologram walking safari in the Hisma landscape, giving visitors a way to encounter the animals being rewilded in the desert through an immersive, guided route. Our team 3D scanned the canyon to ground the experience in the real terrain, then created and animated each hyper-realistic 3D animal from scratch, ensuring the digital wildlife could feel physically present and scale-accurate in the environment.
To deliver this outdoors at scale, we engineered custom projection-based holographic hardware and a positionally-aware audience system that synchronised narration to each moment of encounter. The story layer was designed as an interpretive thread, with a desert “Jinn” or spirit guiding visitors through short narratives about each species, linking wonder to conservation and NEOM’s wider ambition around protection, restoration, and rewilding
Across the six-month exhibition period, the installation featured 12 iconic animal holograms interacting with the environment along the route.
The experience was accessed by an estimated 5,000 participants, including tourists, NEOM staff, and government VIPs, demonstrating the project’s ability to engage diverse audiences while embedding conservation storytelling into the physical landscape.
We are creating conservation projects that are participatory by design – for people to get involved or even just to sort of get up close and learn, and they can be good for the soul too.”
