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A hundred years of Banque Delubac
264sessions across two evenings
12headsets deployed
1924the founding, at Le Cheylard
Founded in 1924 at Le Cheylard, in the Ardèche, Banque Delubac & Cie turned a hundred in 2024. The question was how to tell a century of history to guests at a cocktail evening, without adding one more speech.
The answer was virtual reality: an immersive film that takes each viewer back to the village where it all started, then flies them over Paris, where the bank later opened its second base. Six months of production, from April 2024.
A village rebuilt, not a postcard
The main square of Le Cheylard was rebuilt in 3D: the façades, the fountain, the shops, the traffic. The film moves through the decades rather than stopping in 1924. On the evening of the Ardèche screening, an employee pointed out that the one-way system of the 1960s ran the other way round. That is the kind of detail that tells you whether a reconstruction holds up.
Two evenings, two audiences
The setup first ran on 27 June 2024 at the Cercle de l’Union interalliée in Paris, from 8.30 pm to 0.15 am: 129 sessions. Then on 19 September at the Château d’Urbilhac, in the Ardèche, from 8 pm to 11.30 pm: 135 sessions, peaking just before the dancing began.
Twelve headsets sat inside a closed booth, four in use at a time for most of the evening, up to eight people seated together at the busiest moments. The booth’s sound isolation mattered as much as the image: with a live band a few metres away, not one guest complained about not being able to hear.
What the guests said
Many were trying virtual reality for the first time that evening, with no difficulty or discomfort. The feedback focused on how realistic the scenes looked and on the effect of flying over Paris. The Ardèche audience, who knew the places, paid the closest attention to detail, and several guests came over to ask how the reconstruction had been made.
