Immersive VR Education Ltd.
Software
Unity
Timing
40 minutes of storytelling. In the interactive mode you can stay longer.
Narration
The narration is mostly first person recordings of the mission. We start with Kennedy’s famous speech and see the speech on a tv and projector in a 70s style room.
During the mission you hear the radio control conversation from the historic landing. This sound and static gives authenticity to the experience, giving you a greater understanding of how it transpired.
When you are in interactive mode and land on the moon, you have the ability to move around and learn more about a few items they placed on the surface. When you hover over to hear about it, an Irish lady reads a text that you see. This was a bit disconcerting, after over half an hour of listening to American male voices from recordings (static) the contrast seemed huge and had me questioning (why the hell does she have an Irish accent?) What I learned from this is that consistency in narration is essential.
Subtitles
You have the option to show subtitles or not. This is nice for those who want to concentrate on what is being said as the recordings are hard to perceive. The subtitles are attached to your POV and are small 2d white texts with a black stroke, easy to read and only have 5 or 6 words at a time.
UI Training
For the interactive mode, you are given instructions via png images. It is a lot of text to read at once and even though you don’t have a large remote, they overcomplicate the instructions by featuring everything in one view.
Story Arch
The experience of the moon landing through the eyes of those who lived through it. Using a mix of original archive audio and video together with accurate recreations of the spacecraft and locations, all set to inspirational music. Get set for an experience that will not only educate you but will also leave a lasting impression and deep respect for the men and women who worked on the Apollo program during NASA’s golden era. Apollo 11 VR is a new type of documentary, not only do you get to relive the events of 1969, you can also take control and fly the command module, land the lunar lander, explore the Moon’s surface and deploy the lunar experiments all before returning to earth in a fiery re-entry. Take one small step today and climb aboard Apollo 11 for the journey of a lifetime.
Cinematography
Done with Unity and maybe one or two Unreal Engine scenes. It was apparent for most of the experience that it was a simulation that was trying to be real. It was in the “uncanny valley” for quite a bit of it. Some of the movement was camera panning in space which was sickening. What worked nicely was with the takeoff, you could look out the window and see the liftoff into space which worked really well and was well rendered (from images) so it looked quite realistic.
Framing
They were all full shots. Sometimes you were an astronaut yourself, othertimes you were viewing them from above.
Learning Information
In the moon landing scene, you could jump to icons where you could learn more about something. When you pressed them, 3 virtual cards would appear above the object which were covered in text as anecdotes. An Irish woman would read the text. Even though the object was there physically (3d) I felt the cards were lacking original pictures, videos, or photos from reality. It was lacking emotional factors.
Color Palette
Full colour.
Composition
It was mostly full scenography, just like it would be in the real space.
Point of View
The user is an astronaut or a bystander. You have no body for some of the experience, but other scenes, you have a body. Other people don’t acknowledge you and you are a bit confused what your role is in the overall story.
Looking Around
The user cannot interact with the scene except for the landing bits. For the most part you look directly in front of you, I rarely turned around. The main nice feature was looking out of the train.
Storytelling
The experience is linear and very long, at times boring because there is little to see other than space or a capsule. You could not jump in the narrative, skip or fast forward, which I found very frustrating. I also had no idea how long it would be and since I was a bit bored, frustrated by the length of the experience. If the narrative bits would be edited more, I think the story could have been told in 20 minutes without losing much value.
Sound
There is a nice “adventure” soundtrack throughout as well as the recordings from the past. The sound was immensely important as was the dialogue because visually very little things happened. Without sound, the experience would not have worked.
EEL VR Storytelling Research 