This chapter is about stars, starting with our star, the Sun. We go inside the sun and then the project transitions to black holes. Here we learn some neat facts about black holes, gravity, time dilation, the event horizon. You are asked to pull a star into the gravitational pull of a black hole and then we see what happens (sort of) when another black hole is sucked into your black hole.

It remains basic animation with some fantastic audio design, which is really the star of this experience. Get it, star. Anyway, Jessica Chastain narrates this experience.

I don’t like the use of 360 degree space because I don’t like to spin around in my seat while watching an experience. As you pull the star into the black hole, the star travels all around and if you want to watch it, you need to spin around with it. Yeah, I’d rather just look forward and wait for it to come back around to me. I don’t really feel that telling a story behind me adds anything to the experience, instead, it makes it rather unpleasant.

I’m surprised that they decided to just use 360 animation and not 360 3D animation. The scenes do feel flat at times. Our brain is really good at tricking us into seeing things in 3D, so we do get a lot of depth cues and interpret some object as having dimension. I’m glad our brains do this because it does make the experience more engaging. But it would have been better if they planned a 3D experience.

The narration tells us that we are the black hole, and that is how they incorporate you into the narrative. You get the perspective of the black hole, which is a little strange because it’s not experimental. If I am a black hole, I want to be a “Jupiter beyond the infinite” black hole and have some super trippy visuals.

It’s still the kind of experience I want to see more of in VR, but I think they could up their game in a couple of different points, mostly, let 90% of the experience take place in your field of view, don’t make us look behind us to see what is going on. We have a freaking VR headset strapped to our heads, I don’t want to be moving all around in a narrative story experience.

Technical Specs:
Various languages – can choose what language to view it in
Animation
360 Degrees – can see all around, and the project makes us of much of the space
Voice over Narration
Interactive Elements
Educational