System: Valve Index, HTC Vive & Oculus Rift
Price at Time Of Review: £1.59
Comfort Rating: Yellow (Mild Movement)
Genre: 360 Video and Animation
Input: Keyboard & Mouse
Best Playing Position: Standing or Sitting
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: PG
Description: If you’re anything like me, then you’ve been dreaming about traveling to space since you can remember. But if you’re not an astronaut, and you don’t happen to be sitting on a mountain made of money, then this simply won’t happen by sitting around and waiting. Fewer than 600 people have ever travelled to space. Lucky them… but what about the rest of us? This software is about enabling us, the remaining 99.999992%, to get that experience.
This is a made for VR experience that uses real world HD video footage to recreate the experience of flying to an altitude of 30 km above the surface of the earth on a floating platform. An immersive VR environment allows users to warp to set altitudes above the earth, and return to the ground by jumping off of the floating platform.
Review: It seems like forever the VR2Space project was funded on Kickstarter, but finally, here we are. The project was a simple weather balloon going into space (30km altitude) but it was going to carry a 12 HD camera rig capable of being edited together to make a VR 360° video. Well, that happened and now they have stitched it all together, eliminated most the spinning nausea and have turned it into a proper app.
Starting off inside a very basic menu you can join in the experience from various hight points. From take off, 5, 10, 15…etc, etc. There are also some nods to various people that help bring the project to life. Going to the various heights is as simple as walking into the sphere you want. What is so amazing about this app is that once you have gone into an orb, you can then walk around on the 3D platform! It’s a weird feeling to be able to do that in a 360 video app, but it feels oddly real. A very clever piece of video trickery indeed.
I think the team at the Surrey Space Centre worked very hard on this project and it’s nice to see that it finally paid off and they have this finished project. To be fair the editing and stitching has been done amazingly well and at times it feels more like a blurry 3D adventure rather than a real-world 360 video one. Sadly the real world often sucks and it takes this balloon almost an hour to get into space which means the trip gets boring rather quickly. Most people will skip from the launch to the 25km stage and that will be it. For many of us, this will be the closest thing we will ever get to go into space as once you realise it’s a very long and boring trip you might not want to do it in real life.
