Cologne Zoo Adds a Virtual Savanna Next Door

Cologne Zoo has put a virtual savanna directly across the path from a real one. On July 30, 2026, the zoo and the Cologne company TimeRide launched SAVANNA VR, a mixed-reality walk through the African savanna installed in the old rhinoceros house, opposite the zoo’s new giraffe habitat. It is the second TimeRide installation at the zoo, after Dino VR.

What the visitor actually does

There are two stations. The first begins at a virtual globe, where augmented reality is used to show how the savanna forms, what types of savanna exist and why the habitat holds the range of species it does. The image then switches to full virtual reality and the visitor is standing in the savanna itself, moving through it from the animals’ eye level, up into the canopy and down into water, with a narrator supplying the background.

At the second station visitors take a turn themselves, watching on virtual playing fields how animal life shifts between the dry season and the rainy season. The zoo describes this half as play rather than instruction, which is an honest description of what it is.

The whole thing runs about 25 minutes and is available in German and English. Cologne Zoo recommends it from age six.

The giraffes it was built beside

The timing is the point. The zoo’s new giraffe habitat, which it says is twice the size of the old one, had just opened with two residents, Maoli and Penda, whom the zoo identifies as Kordofan giraffes. SAVANNA VR sits in the old rhinoceros house directly opposite it, so the sequence a family gets is the animals first and the ecosystem second.

“Erst unsere beiden Kordofan-Giraffen ,Penda’ und ,Maoli’ live bewundern. Dann direkt gegenueber in ihren natuerlichen Lebensraum eintauchen und spannende Fakten darueber erfahren: Das ist moderne Erlebnispaedagogik, die in den Koepfen der Menschen bleibt,” said Prof. Theo B. Pagel and Christopher Landsberg, the executive board of Cologne Zoo. In English, in a statement translated from German: “First admire our two Kordofan giraffes, Penda and Maoli, live. Then, directly opposite, dive into their natural habitat and learn fascinating facts about it. That is modern experiential education, the kind that stays in people’s heads.”

Jonas Rothe, founder and managing director of TimeRide GmbH, framed it from the other side. “Bei SAVANNA VR sehen Familien die Savanne mit den Augen ihrer Bewohner und spueren, wie kostbar dieses Oekosystem ist,” he said, in a statement translated from German: “With SAVANNA VR, families see the savanna through the eyes of its inhabitants and feel how precious this ecosystem is.”

Times and prices

Tours start from 11:30 a.m., with the last tour at 5 p.m., in the old rhinoceros house opposite the giraffe habitat. Tickets are 11 euros regular and 9 euros reduced for children and young people aged 6 to 12, on top of zoo admission. The zoo recommends the combination ticket that includes entry, and sells both through its own website.

A note on the giraffes’ status

Cologne Zoo names the subspecies and leaves it there, and so will we. We were not able to open an IUCN assessment for the Kordofan giraffe from the Red List’s species search, which returns nothing for that name under a global species filter, so this piece carries no conservation category for the animals in the photograph. Where we can read an assessment we use it, and where we cannot, the honest form is to say so rather than to repeat a number from somewhere else. The zoo’s own release makes no status claim either.

What the zoo does claim is a doubling of the giraffe habitat, and a second visitor attraction that explains the ecosystem the animals came from. European zoos have been building this pairing for a while now: an enclosure and an interpretation of it, sold separately. Cologne’s own Drachenhaus, the Southeast Asian tropical house that opened in August 2026, took the opposite approach and put the interpretation inside the building.

Source: Cologne Zoo.