Background

Amnesia Ibiza has been open since 1976, when it started as the "Taller del Olvido" — an old Ibizan farmhouse that became a refuge for the island's counterculture and, over the following decades, one of the defining venues of electronic dance music. For its 50th anniversary in 2026 the club wanted visitors to pass through that history rather than read it off a wall, and commissioned the Zaragoza studio DeuSens to build a narrative virtual reality experience with a complementary mobile layer, designed from the outset as a portable exhibition format.

Six scenes, ten minutes

The headset experience runs as a continuous cycle of about ten minutes, structured as six chronological scenes. It opens in the hippie Ibiza of the 1970s and the beginnings of the Taller del Olvido, moves into that bohemian space under a psychedelic visual treatment, jumps to the open-air terrace of 1984–86 where Alfredo Fiorito shaped the Balearic Beat, crosses the architectural transformation of the 1990s when the roof went on and international residencies such as Cream, Cocoon and La Troya arrived, drops into those parties, and closes in the present-day club with an audiovisual climax synchronised to "Knight of the Jaguar". Amnesia's own account adds that the narration was recorded by Katie Knight in Spanish and English.

Gaze, masks and spatial audio

The experience is hands-free. Interaction is gaze-based: visitors trigger content by resting their eyes on floating historical photographs, which open fans of period images and video. In the scene covering the club's biggest nights, three floating 3D masks — Cream, Cocoon and La Troya — let the visitor pick a room and move freely between them. 360º spatial audio carries narration, ambience and music through the story, ending on a drop synchronised with lighting, CO2 effects and real footage of the club.

A phone layer behind QR codes

Posters carrying QR codes are placed around the venue; Amnesia describes three such points inside the club. Scanning one opens a 360º scene of how that area looked in the past, explored by turning the phone using its gyroscope, with no app to install. Both the club and the studio present this layer as augmented reality, though the mechanic described is a gyroscope-driven 360º view rather than content registered to the phone's camera feed.

Two deployment phases

The system was built to move. It ran first at the "50 Years, 50 Memories" exhibition at the Hyde Hotel Ibiza in Cala Llonga, open free of charge from 22 April to 22 May 2026 and presented within the International Music Summit programme, alongside unpublished photographs and personal accounts from across the club's history. It then moved into Amnesia itself for the season, adapted to the venue's own conditions, where it is bundled into the club's Special Anniversary Experience package with a guided tour of areas normally closed to the public, fast-track VIP entry, anniversary merchandise and drinks.

Hardware and software

• Built in Unreal Engine by DeuSens
• Delivered on PICO 4 Ultra Enterprise headsets, rendering on-device
• Mobile 360º layer opened from QR codes in the phone browser, no download
• Designed as a replicable format so the same experience can be re-staged elsewhere