Following in the footsteps of ILM Immersive’s (formerly ILMxLAB) “Vader Immortal” game and the company’s virtual reality experiences like “Star Wars: Secret of the Empire” and “Avengers: Damage Control,” “What If…? — An Immersive Story” gives fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe the opportunity not only to enter the world of their favorite superheroes, but to participate in the adventure with them.
Borrowing the name from the Disney+ anthology television series (and the Marvel Comics series that inspired it) that explores a speculative timeline in the superhero multiverse, “An Immersive Story” uses Apple’s Vision Pro headset to create a universe where participants interact with Watcher-like characters. can Sorcerer Supreme Vong, and a handful of alternate-reality heroes (and villains). Best of all, they can recreate and use those characters’ strengths to further their own story. “What if…?” Director and executive producer Dave Bushore says his approach to the project, released for free on May 30, was as free from constraints as the show was inspired by.
“The only obstacle was how many times we could ask ‘What if?’ of us,” Bushore says Diversity.
Led by Wong, Doctor Strange’s sorcerer counterpart, the trademark banter, “What if…?” The participant learns how to repeat the movements of the characters and use the power of the Infinity Stones to open portals. Bushore says that even though the story is unrelated to proper Marvel canon, he wanted to integrate characters that MCU fans knew – just in a unique way. “When we were developing this, it was ‘what was in the past? What was in those movies?’ And we took it [approach] With a teenage Hela character,” he says, referring to a pint-sized version of the “Thor” foe.
‘What if…? – An Immersive Story’ reimagines Thor antagonist Hela as a scrappy teenager.
Courtesy Marvel Studios/ ILM Immersive
“For all characters, [she has] A different perspective,” he explains. “It comes from a place in the story of, ‘I don’t really want to do hero stuff, I just want to get my friend back’.” Bushore says he encouraged writers David Dong and Phil McCarty to take a similar approach with Infinity Stones. “The Soul Gem is an iconic piece of Marvel storytelling. So being able to take that and go, ‘Let’s use it differently,’ was fun.
For hours, to develop the mixed-reality experience, Bushore worked with ILM Immersive Executive Producer Sherif M. Worked hand in hand with Fattuh, who previously worked on “Ralph Brakes VR” and “Damage Control” created for virtual reality environments. void. “You have a headset that can do this crystal clear pass-through and detect your hand and reach where it doesn’t have a controller, we’ve been thinking about that for a long time,” Fattuh says. “So we’re really excited about making it narrative-focused versus a traditional game.”
Bushore says they used classic storytelling techniques to set up the experience before inviting viewers to become active participants. “Traditional media, people have a sense — an intro, an outro, an action sequence,” he says. So what we specifically did was 2D flat media that tells an emotional story to the characters that you’re going to run into, before you go into a three-dimensional space where you’re now the main character.”
Fattuh highlights a key difference between immersive experiences and traditional media. “It’s so weird not being able to cut,” he says. The solution they found was to use cinematic vignettes—short narrative clips that unfold like “shards” from the disintegrating multiverse—that serve as gateways to interactive sequences. “We brought an amazing team to Flying Bark to work on real [“What If…?”] show so that we can get the traditional forms of the series into the ‘Shard’,” he says. “So you have a lot of dramatic cuts, more classic cinematography that can be done to tell a story, but then when we’re in our AR and VR moments.”
Developing projects for the void when envisioning this project for Apple Vision Pro, and the Oculus Quest and Rift headsets also gave them an advantage, even though the absence of an Apple device handset or a more traditional controller presented them with new challenges. “We knew the basics of what worked well, what kind of gestures were comfortable. Because there’s a lot of stuff that’s like, ‘That would be awesome,’ but you do it, and it didn’t give me the feeling I wanted to get,” Fattuh recalls. “It’s fictionally true, but It’s not physically true.”
He says it took a lot of trial and error to create a harmonious experience between traditional and interactive elements. “The Time Stone moment is great [example]”says Fattouh. “Where’s Hela, where’s Wong, when the Time Stone comes out, what we’re asking you to do, the framing was very cinematic in style, yet it was interactive, with really traditional techniques to create an emotional beat. .cinematic filmmaking.”
In ‘What if…? — an immersive story,’ participants are trained to unlock the powers of the Infinity Stones.
Courtesy Marvel Studios/ ILM Immersive
Following the rebranding of ILMxLAB as ILM Immersive, many of the company’s previous interactive experiences effectively disappeared; Although projects like “Avengers: Damage Control” were well-attended at void locations and otherwise critically acclaimed, their complexity prevented them from transferring (or translating) to consumer consoles like the Oculus headsets used for “Vader Immortal.” were Bushore and Fattuh suggest that “What if…?” Offering participants not only a multi-faceted — and potentially update-able — experience that rewards multiple views, but only scratches the surface of what they hope to do in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“There’s a lot out there for people interested in going back,” says Fattuh. “But the possibilities are really endless. I mean, with this kind of content methodology and how it’s delivered, it’s not a stretch to imagine that there could be things added.”
Bushore adds, “When you release something into the wild, most of the time you can’t replace it. We can change this. We can literally react in real time to some degree to what the audience is thinking.
They will, of course, come down to how many people actually try out the hour-long experience, which is currently only available on Apple Vision Pro. (In April 2024, Apple estimated first-year sales of the headset at 400,000 to 450,000, with a $3,500 price tag limiting access to the device, far less than its content.) Bushore admits he’s not sure what’s next for Marvel Studios in the VR space. , but “What if..,?” He is particularly enthusiastic about the future of interactive storytelling, after trying to answer the question posed by
“I grew up seeing stories of being able to go into computer simulations, and now we have that capability,” Bushore says. “To put people in a space with characters to make them feel things is at the core of why we tell stories in the first place. And I can’t wait to do it again.