The golden rule for creating compelling VR content is that you should allow people to experience something that would be either impossible or too dangerous, expensive and/or difficult to do in real life. Placing you in a lifeboat in 1912 to witness the RMS Titanic sinking into the cold dark waters of the Atlantic, then letting you explore the wreck which now lies 12,500 feet below the surface, it’s safe to say Titanic VR more than meets the qualifications.
The story of the unsinkable ship and its 1,503 doomed passengers and crew is told from a first-person perspective of one of the survivors, and the animation sequences; which show people being loaded onto the lifeboats and then the ship sinking from the POV of one of the lifeboats, were all created using eye-witness accounts.
The second part of the experience challenges you to explore the wreck using a submersible and ROV. A “Mission Mode” challenges you to solve various quests, including rescuing a lost ROV, designing a photo mosaic, placing research equipment, and cleaning and preserving recovered artifacts. If that all sounds like too much work, however, you’re also free to just look around the shipwreck at your leisure.
Link to video presentation can be found here.
The game was produced by Immersive VR Education (IVRE), a VR/AR studio based in Ireland which previously released the award-winning Apollo 11 VR moon landing experience back in 2016, and, more recently, an experience commissioned by the BBC commemorating the 100th anniversary of the RAF 1943: Berlin Blitz.
Source: Alice Bonasio, VR Scout
Image Credit:Immersive VR Education Ltd