Via Digitaltrends.com:
Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine is a 5-minute long virtual reality experience that lets you star in an original Star Wars story alongside R2-D2, the Millennium Falcon (with Han Solo communicating with you from the cockpit), and your very own light saber from Luke Skywalker. It’s available for free download, and stands out as one of the most impressive VR experiences out there today.
“Most of the work that we’re doing at ILMxLab is really around looking at longer experiences now,” Rob Bredow, chief technology officer at Lucasfilm, told Digital Trends before his talk at the VIEW Conference in Turin, Italy. “Trials on Tatooine is really just a bite-sized experiment and it was designed to be three to five minutes. You can stay in there as long as seven or eight if you really take the time, but it’s a relatively short experience.”
Next up for ILMxLab is a longer experience that’ll include more storytelling, and star one of the best-known characters in the Star Wars universe. Darth Vader.
“We’re doing a VR experience that’s going to feature Vader, and that’s not just a little bite-sized experience,” Bredow said. “It’s designed to be very much more involved. And the ergonomics are getting better as time goes on, and we’re looking at an audience that’s getting more acclimated to experiencing things in VR. We’ll see as the year plays out how people adapt to those longer experiences, and how people enjoy those longer experiences, but we’re pretty optimistic.”
Bredow knows firsthand how easy it is to lose oneself in an immersive VR environment. He said he can easily spend half an hour in Tilt Brush on HTC Vive making something, without even realizing what time it is.
The future of storytelling
ILMxLab, which is comprised of talent from Lucasfilm, ILM, LucasArts, and Skywalker Sound, is focused on developing, creating, and releasing story-based immersive entertainment for virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality platforms.
“We formed this development group at Lucasfilm to be able to maintain some of the amazing talent from LucasArts, who have made some of the most innovative games for many years — and games that I was a fan of for many years, and a whole bunch of new talent that’s come in to really help augment our creative and our engineering teams to work on virtual reality, mixed reality, and augmented reality at ILMxLab,” Bredow said.
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