Spheres Chapter 1: Chorus of the Cosmos is the VR equivalent of a cool educational planetarium show. It marvels at the wonders of the cosmos and brings us along a voyage of discovering our solar system. This is an animated short, interactive film, with voice over narration and interactive music. 

The project slowly opens into a starry space after you select your chapter and language (it is nice that you can choose between a couple different languages). Surrounded by stars and small clusters, the story does not seem to progress until you reach out with your hand controllers and glide your hand through the stars, which creates various aurora borealis light trails. Music changes as you play with the stars. 

The aurora borealis lights grow distant and glow over the Earth. As Earth glides away from you, voice over narration informs us of the electromagnetic field over earth and encourages us to play with the sound waves and form our own music of the universe. After playing around with the electromagnetic field, the view zooms out to reveal our planets in order from the sun.

With this big picture view of our solar system, we are invited to push the planets into their orbit. I don’t like that you can push the planets in different directions. Sure, planets orbit counterclockwise when viewed from above and could seem to rotate clockwise when viewed from below, but all the planets move in the same direction, and so this education project should only allow you to push the planets in the same orbital direction. I also don’t like that you have to move around a lot to reach and push all of the different planets. I was sitting on my bed viewing this as a stationary piece, but really, you need a lot of room to interact with this segment. At times, planets got stuck under my pillow and I couldn’t reach them. Oh the real world, how you always get in the way of the virtual world! 

This is a seated experience though, so I don’t think this solar system segment should take up as much space as it does. What is cool about this segment though is that when you touch each planet, you get some sounds from the planet. I believe these are naturally occurring frequencies from the planet that have been interpreted into music.

I think the “sounds of the universe” is the greatest strength of this project because it is not something we are used to hearing. The animation does not do our solar system justice, especially since we have spectacular real life photos of the planets, and because this animation is pretty rough and basic. But the sounds are fantastic. It really lends to the majesty and the wonder we have about space. 

I’ve watched this project a few times and while I would like to see more of this type of project in VR, I think this chapter is a bit overrated. 

Technical Specs:

Various languages – can choose what language to view it in

Animation – Sometimes seems like 3D but it is not, it is simply 360

360 Degrees – can see all around, and the project makes us of much of the space

Voice over Narration

Interactive Elements – Can interact with some objects with your hand controllers

Educational