Conquering Mount Everest is on the bucket list of many climbers and adrenaline junkies, but only a few will ever have the stacks of cash and hundreds of hours of climbing experience required to scale its summit. But now, with the release of Sólfar Studios' Everest VR, you can experience the majesty of Everest from the safety and comfort of your own home, for a fraction of the cost and without any prior climbing experience.

Developed using hundreds of thousands of high resolution Everest photos, Everest VR delivers a realistic, highly immersive, real-time stereophotogrammetry recreation of the eponymous mountain, which gamers can conquer in room scale VR on the HTC Vive. Begin at base camp, prepare for the ascent, cross the Khumbu Icefalls and other treacherous real-life locations that test climbers' skill and frequently claim lives, and fight through to reach the summit.

For GeForce GTX gamers, immersion is heightened further still by the addition of NVIDIA Turbulence effects, which apply physical properties to snow particles, enabling them to accurately move and interact with one another. Snowflakes accurately sweep around the terrain, obscure your vision, collide with your virtual body, and form the most realistic blizzards and snow storms ever seen in a game. See for yourself in the Turbulence video below.

In addition to Turbulence, Everest VR also utilizes NVIDIA VRWorks' Multi-Res Shading, an innovative technique that subdivides each eye in a VR headset into 9 parts, enabling us to independently control the resolution of each part. Doing so allows us to decrease the resolution of the image in your peripheral sight, without reducing the quality of the image in your direct vision, increasing performance whilst maintaining overall image quality.

With Multi-Res Shading enabled, frame rates are increased by over 65% on average, giving players additional headroom to increase visual fidelity, or to activate a higher level of SteamVR supersampling. All GeForce GTX 900 and 10 Series GPUs recommended by HTC and SteamVR support VRWorks, giving GeForce GTX Virtual Reality gamers playing at the minimum spec or higher the ability to benefit from this innovative technique.

Everest VR's unique combination of graphical techniques, and its collaboration with movie FX company RVX, has created a stunning and highly immersive recreation of Mount Everest. One that enables virtual mountaineers to better understand the challenges and experiences of those who attempt to conquer its treacherous peak year after year. And until holodecks become reality, Everest VR will be the closest the rest of mankind will ever get to scaling and exploring the world's most alluring mountain.

To climb Mount Everest from the safety of your own home, strap your wallet to a carabineer and head on over to Everest VR's Steam page. For more on Virtual Reality, check out our tech page.