EVEREST VR™

EVEREST VR™
Information
VR/AR	VR
Developer	Sólfar Studios, RVX
Publisher	Sólfar Studios
Platform	SteamVR, Oculus Home, PlayStation 4
Device	HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR
Operating System	Windows
Type	Full Game
Genre	Simulation, VR, Atmospheric, Indie, First-Person
Input Device	Tracked motion controllers, Oculus Touch, PlayStation Move, DualShock 4
Play Area	Standing, Room-Scale
Game Mode	Single Player
Language	English
Review	Mixed
Release Date	Aug 2, 2016 (HTC Vive); Feb 14, 2017 (Oculus Rift); Oct 3, 2017 (PlayStation VR)
Price	US$9.99 (Steam, October 2026); US$24.99 at launch
App Store	Steam, Oculus Store, Viveport, PlayStation Store
Website	http://www.solfar.com
Infobox Updated	10/21/2026

EVEREST VR™ is a virtual reality experience that recreates an expedition up Mount Everest. It was developed by the Icelandic studio Sólfar Studios together with the Reykjavík visual effects and animation company RVX, and published by Sólfar. The mountain was rebuilt with stereo photogrammetry from more than 300,000 high-resolution photographs and rendered in Unreal Engine 4. It was Sólfar's first released product.

The experience launched on Steam for the HTC Vive on 2 August 2016, came to the Oculus Rift on 14 February 2017 and to PlayStation VR on 3 October 2017. Sólfar decided early in development that it would be an accessible experience rather than a game, built around a handful of key moments on the climb. Later free updates added an expanded "God Mode" with a selectable scale and 18 historical summit routes, photographs from the 1953 British expedition supplied by the Royal Geographical Society, and a documentary-style update made with Seeker.

Reviewed 21 October 2026. Checked every claim against the cited Sólfar posts, Steam store, news and review data, Fortune, Road to VR, UploadVR, VICE, MCV, Techgage, NVIDIA, Shacknews, Northstack, OpenCritic and Meta Quest Store pages; System Requirements against Steam. About review dates.

Development

Sólfar announced EVEREST VR on 10 November 2015 as a co-production with RVX, which the studio described as a Nordic visual effects and animation house. Road to VR reported the announcement alongside Sólfar's US$2.1 million seed round, with Kjartan Pierre Emilsson as chief executive, and said the project was planned for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR in 2016. In the announcement, Emilsson said the goal was "to construct the definitive experience of what it feels like to summit Mount Everest", and RVX founder and creative director Dadi Einarsson said that the project placed the participant into a story where they control their own pace.

According to Sólfar, the two studios used stereo photogrammetry and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN X graphics card to process more than 300,000 high-resolution images of the mountain range into a detailed 3D point cloud of the area. From that they generated a 3D mesh and textures sized for a real-time VR application. Fortune reported that RVX, which had worked on the visual effects for the feature film Everest, shot the high-resolution photographs on the mountain, and that the photos were applied to the reconstructed geometry as texture maps. The same report said that Sólfar's lead animator, Óðinn Árnason, an ice climber and mountaineer, advised on climbing equipment, and that the game designer Dean Hall visited the studio to share his own experience of climbing Everest. Co-founder Thor Gunnarsson told Fortune that the project was not meant as a technical mountaineering simulation but would focus on key moments of an expedition.

In Sólfar's launch announcement, which was signed by Emilsson in its Steam version, the studio said it chose to make an experience rather than a game for two reasons: the level of visual fidelity it wanted could only be reached for a few key locations with the studio's team size and budget, and the team wanted something people of any age and computer literacy could try. It therefore chose five key moments of the ascent and let users move through them at their own pace. Gunnarsson later told VICE: "This is absolutely not a game."

Content

The Steam release presents Everest in five scenes: preparation at Base Camp, the Khumbu Icefall, an overnight stop at Camp 4, the Hillary Step and the summit. Completing a first summit attempt unlocks God Mode, a view of the Himalayas in which the user towers over the range like a diorama. Road to VR's reviewer described the interactions as climbing ladders, clipping carabiners and picking up objects, with locomotion by teleportation within each scene, and found that reaching the summit took about 30 minutes. Gunnarsson told VICE that the team wanted to perfect the sense of presence, and VICE's writer described users grabbing supplies, securing themselves to ropes with their hands and waving to their guides when ready to move on.

Updates

Sólfar's second major free update, released on 14 February 2017 alongside the Rift version, rebuilt God Mode so that it could be entered directly from the lobby. Users can choose the scale at which they explore the whole mountain range, from 1:1, where each step on the terrain corresponds to real locomotion and other climbers and camps are visible, up to a "mile-high giant" view. The update added 18 well-known summit routes, info points with photographs from the 1953 expedition of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay placed where the photographs were originally taken, and a new scene of the roped ascent of the Lhotse Face from Camp 3 to Camp 4. UploadVR noted that the routes appear as blue lines that can be followed by teleporting, and quoted Gunnarsson describing the rescaled mode as "Google Earth on steroids"; the article said the developer took inspiration from Google Earth VR for the feature. Sólfar's PlayStation VR announcement gave the God Mode scales as ranging from 1500x to 1x.

On 14 November 2017 Sólfar released EVEREST VR: The Seeker Expedition as a free update for owners of the Vive and Rift versions. Made as a creative and editorial collaboration with Seeker, it adds audio guides, infographic sequences and 360-degree video filmed on Everest. Its topics range from the geology of the Himalayas and the effect of climate change on the mountain to the physiology of high-altitude climbing. It includes accounts from the mountaineer Conrad Anker, the expedition captain Lakpa Rita Sherpa and the geologist and author Mike Searle, and Norbu Tenzing, vice president of the American Himalayan Foundation and son of Tenzing Norgay, talks about Sherpa culture and his father's 1953 ascent. The update also includes 360-degree footage filmed by the VR Explorers during their 2016 summit. The current Meta Quest Store listing for the PC VR version mentions the Seeker content.

In September 2016 Sólfar published a mixed reality trailer. It said that Valve had used EVEREST VR for a short mixed reality segment in its SteamVR launch trailer, and that Sólfar and RVX had then built their own Unreal Engine code to film participants on a green screen and composite them into the real-time scene, a form of mixed reality capture. Sólfar credited Wang Hao of Directive Games for the mixed reality code and said all footage was captured in real time without post-production beauty passes. The participants were students from the Technical College in Reykjavík.

Technology

EVEREST VR was built in Unreal Engine 4. The launch announcement said the team integrated several middleware products into the engine, naming Simplygon, Granite from Graphine and trueSKY from Simul, to make the most of its content while keeping the experience running on typical VR hardware. MCV reported in March 2016 that Sólfar was using Graphine's Granite texture-streaming SDK to render the mountain's textures; Graphine's chief executive, Aljosha Demeulemeester, said the middleware was designed to handle large amounts of texture content at a stable frame rate.

NVIDIA's GameWorks VR reached Unreal Engine 4 in November 2015, and Techgage's report on the integration featured an EVEREST VR demo, noting that NVIDIA GPUs had been used both to create and to render the experience. At launch the experience used NVIDIA's Multi-resolution shading, which lowers the rendering resolution in the periphery of the image, and NVIDIA Turbulence for real-time blizzards and spindrift. Emilsson acknowledged that this left less room to optimize for AMD, so the AMD Radeon RX 480 was set as the minimum AMD card. In November 2016 the experience added NVIDIA's Lens Matched Shading for Pascal GPUs. NVIDIA stated that without the feature the first-pass image is 2.1 megapixels per eye for a 1.1-megapixel final image, that Lens Matched Shading reduces the first pass to 1.4 megapixels, and that this gives a 50% increase in pixel-shading throughput and a 15% performance gain over Multi-Res Shading. These are NVIDIA's own figures.

Road to VR wrote that the experience tunes its graphics settings to the installed GPU and exposes options for supersampling, weather intensity and detail radius.

Release

Date	Platform	Notes
2 August 2016	HTC Vive (Steam)	Launch release; Road to VR listed the price as US$24.99
14 February 2017	Oculus Rift (Oculus Home)	US$14.99, with Oculus Touch support; released with the free God Mode and Lhotse Face update
3 October 2017	PlayStation VR (PlayStation Store)	US$14.99; playable with PlayStation Move controllers or the DualShock 4
14 November 2017	Vive and Rift	Free update The Seeker Expedition

With the February 2017 update Sólfar set the price at US$14.99 on all platforms. As of October 2026 the Steam version sells for US$9.99 in the United States, and Sólfar's product page links to the PlayStation Store, Steam, Oculus and Viveport listings. Sólfar also offers the experience to arcades and public VR exhibits through Steam's site licensing program.

Royal Geographical Society

On 15 February 2017 Sólfar announced that the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) in London had accepted a charitable donation of EVEREST VR, to be held as part of the society's Everest Collection. The donation was meant to support presentations and demonstrations for the public, schools and UK academic and research audiences, as well as a training function. HTC, NVIDIA and Scan Computers supplied the VR and PC hardware for the installation. Alasdair MacLeod, the society's head of enterprise and resources, said that using historic stills from its photographic collection inside the VR environment "provides added context and value for the viewer". Northstack reported that the experience would become a permanent part of the society's Everest exhibit.

Reception

Road to VR's Matthew Magee reviewed the August 2016 Vive release and gave it an overall score of 5, calling it "an impressive technical showpiece for photogrammetry and VR" and singling out the opening of each scene, in which a small theatre-like room fades away to leave the user flying over the Himalayas. He criticized the narration, the mannequin-like companion climbers, fades to black after interactions, the lack of information about climbing, and play-area start positions that often brought up the chaperone boundary, and concluded that at US$25 users were paying a premium for the views. OpenCritic lists four critic reviews, a 7/10 from Gaming Nexus and a 3.5/10 from Destructoid (August 2016), an 8/10 from Shacknews (February 2017) and a 6/10 from PlayStation Universe (October 2017), and an overall score of 61.

UploadVR wrote that one of its primary criticisms of the original release had been the lack of content, and welcomed the additions in the February 2017 update. Shacknews reviewed the Rift version with Oculus Touch and gave it 8 out of 10, describing it as a way to visit Everest without going there and as relaxing, while noting that some players may feel there is not enough content and that it is not a game. UploadVR found the PlayStation VR version noticeably blurrier than the PC versions, with simplified character models and heavily compressed intro videos, but said that its controls adapted well and that it worked fine on the platform; it still recommended the Rift or Vive versions to owners of those headsets.

As of October 2026 the Steam user rating is "Mixed", with 168 positive and 157 negative reviews out of 325, and the Meta Quest Store listing shows an average of 3.6 from 103 ratings.

Features

• Single-player

System requirements

Steam lists the following requirements for the PC version.

Windows

Minimum

• OS: Windows 7 SP1 +
• Processor: Intel® i5-4590 or greater
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA Geforce® GTX 970 / AMD Radeon RX 480 or greater
• DirectX: Version 11
• Storage: 11 GB available space
• VR Support: SteamVR

Recommended

• OS: Windows 10
• Processor: Intel® i7-4790 or greater
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA Geforce® GTX 1060 or greater
• DirectX: Version 11
• Storage: 11 GB available space

The store page recommends installing the experience on an SSD for faster performance.

See also

• Sólfar Studios
• Virtual tourism
• Photogrammetry
• The Climb