Background
Alberto Ascari remains the only Italian driver to win the Formula One World Championship, claiming back-to-back titles with Ferrari in 1952 and 1953. Defined by a fearless driving style and well-documented superstitions around black cats and the colour black, his life ended at Monza in 1955. Black Cats & Chequered Flags is a location-based multiplayer VR and Mixed Reality experience produced and created by MIAT (Multiverse Institute for Arts & Technology) that brings his story to museum and cultural venue audiences worldwide.
The experience
Directed by Elisabetta Rotolo and Siobhan McDonnell, the project was conceived from the outset for public-facing, museum-grade deployment. The roughly 20-minute experience unfolds in three acts. It opens with a Spatial Memory Fragment — an atmospheric piece placing viewers inside Ascari's emotional world, blending archival audio with childhood imagery and the superstitions that shaped his fate. A multiplayer Mixed Reality pit stop challenge follows, in which groups of visitors collaborate on a 1950s-style tyre change within a shared physical space. The experience concludes with a stylised room-scale VR narrative that weaves archival newsreel footage, motion capture performance, and spatial audio to trace Ascari's championship victories and his final season.
Hardware and software
360-degree films shot on location at MAUTO in Turin, the Ferrari Museum in Maranello, and the Monza racetrack provide archival grounding. Visuals draw on 1950s Italian lithography as a design reference, while the soundtrack incorporates analysed engine recordings recreating the sound of Ascari's Ferrari and spatialised period crowd atmospheres.
Venues and tour
The project debuted at MAUTO (Museo Nazionale dell'Automobile) in Turin in March 2025, as part of the TrialsNet EU open call programme, with more than 200 students from five Turin high schools among the first participants. It was subsequently selected for the 82nd Venice International Film Festival — Venice Immersive (August–September 2025), one of the leading showcases for immersive narrative works. Its world-tour leg launched at Museo Ferrari in Maranello in December 2025, where it attracted close to 4,000 visitors in fewer than 15 days. From June 2026, the exhibition moved to Silverstone Museum in the UK, where it is scheduled to run through June 2027. Director Rotolo has described ongoing negotiations with venues in the US, France, and Qatar for future tour stops.
Recognition
The project has been cited by industry observers as a strong model for museum-ready location-based XR, demonstrating how immersive work conceived for institutional deployment, rather than retrofitted from consumer distribution, can operate at scale across diverse public audiences and institutional contexts.
