Within Partners Up With IMAX VR For Their New VR Experience Called ‘Life Of Us’
Within has been an exemplary studio on how VR experiences should be created. For those that are unfamiliar with the company, Wtihin is one of the premier destinations for innovative, entertaining, and informative story-based virtual reality. They bring together some of the best immersive experiences from very talented VR creators in telling stories from pure imagination. Recently, they announced that they’ll be partnering up with IMAX VR to release a Within Original called Life Of Us.
We were fortunate enough to demo this VR experience during Tribeca Film Festival and were quite surprised by the velocity of the game. In this VR experience you start off as a single-celled organism that’s making it’s way through the evolving world. From the perspective of the organism, you start incorporating motions and voice-overs to become more immersed and animated within the story. We don’t want to spoil the rest so we’ll keep the recap to there.
This launch at the IMAX VR Experience Centre is the first time that Life Of Us has been available to the public. Lasting around 8 to 10 minutes, you can enjoy the same thrill that we felt during our demo at Tribeca. Within also has plans on releasing Life Of Us on their app later this year. We had the chance to speak with Jonny Ahdout who is an executive producer on Life Of Us and he provided us with some insight on their plans for the future.
Ahdout explained that the reason they teamed up with IMAX VR for the first public release of the experience is because IMAX provides a comfortable place for for the general public to try out VR. Operating an HTC Vive or any other HMD can get quite complex at times, especially for this experience as you need a quick rundown and tutorial. Ahdout also believes in the vision of IMAX and how they’re trying to make VR readily available to the public.
Ahdout also stated that there were some improvements made since our last demo with Life Of Us. They made significant changes on the back-end and also tightened up the game-play for the audience to have a deeper and more immersive experience.
Ahdout has been a huge advocate for VR and understands what quality VR experiences take. He told us that the development of this particular story-telling experience felt like a huge excavation project. They needed to test things that’s never been done before in the VR industry and had to make new discoveries along their journey in bringing Life Of Us to life.
Prior to our first demo, Ahdout assured us that that Life Of Us was unlike anything we’ve ever experienced before. And while we went in with some skepticism, we came out as true believers of that statement. Make sure to check out Life Of Us if you are in the Los Angeles area as tickets are moving quick. The experience will also be available soon at the IMAX VR Experience Centre in New York City in the near future.