ILMxLAB, LucasFilm's immersive entertainment laboratory, has released a trailer for "Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine," described as "a cinematic virtual reality experiment." Designed for the HTC Vive VR gear, this gives a glimpse of what could be an upcoming full product -- most likely an interactive movie experience.
The 48-second trailer first shows a person donning a VR gear and holding a controller, then there's a montage of the Millennium Falcon, some Stormtrooper ships, the landscape, fighting, R2D2 handing a lightsaber, and the Jedi weapon being unsheathed. The final scene shows the lightsaber being used for deflecting blasters from a first-person perspective.
IGN explains that "Star Wars: Trials on Tattooine" centers on Luke Skywalker's apprentice, and the events take place after those in "Return of the Jedi." Mitch Dyer, editor of the online publication, narrates that the experience of being this apprentice, waiting for and seeing the Milennium Falcom descend, was "mildly terrifying" but was also "a gleeful moment." The moment of elation got deflated, though, because he was tasked to repair the ship by a "cranky" Han Solo.
The "Star Wars" VR experience, however, is not a game. As explained by Roger Cordes, associate visual effects supervisor at ILMxLAB, "We are a storytelling company."
"We are well-versed in a hundred years of the language of cinema, all of which gets thrown out the window when you no longer have a locked on camera [in VR], and it's a first-person storytelling experience, so we have to kind of find our way in that wilderness about how to tell a compelling story in the Star Wars universe," he said.
As this is labeled as an experiment, it is uncertain at this point if it will ever be released as a full product. As Polygon says, studios have been creating VR experiments although they were not meant to be rolled out for public use. The site, however, surmises that there might be more to this that would be worth discussing in the coming days.
"We've got some large-scale productions going," Tim Alexander, lead visual effects supervisor at ILMxLAB, told IGN. "And [Lucasfilm Story Group] is the basis of that. We are doing stories that will be intersecting. It's all canon, it's all...it's all going to be legit."
ILMxLAB, LucasFilm and Skywalker Sounds are behind the project.
