YOU'VE SEEN THE film, now be in it. That's the thinking behind plans by IMAX to construct self contained virtual reality (VR) zones within its cinemas that film-goers can experience directly after watching a movie.
VR, it seems, has found a new home away from home. Revealed at January's CES exhibition in Las Vegas, IMAX has unveiled plans to open three IMAX VR Experience Centres in North America, and one each in China, Japan and the UK during 2017. In fact, the first IMAX VR centre has already opened – January saw IMAX VR pods entered by film-lovers at the IMAX at The Grove, Los Angeles.
Welcome to location-based VR, then, where you can sample the delights of the immersive technology without making a £2,000 investment in a headset and a high-performance computer. The highest profile VR experience so far is Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine, a post-Return of the Jedi adventure created by Lucasfilm’s new ILMxLAB, which lets you wield a lightsaber on the desert world, repair the Millennium Falcon, and defend R2-D2 from pesky stormtroopers.
Other VR experiences at the first-ever IMAX VR centre include fl ying and fighting over Paris (Eagle Flight), playing an assassin (John Wick Chronicles) and going on a bobsleigh ride across snowy mountains complete with a D-Box dynamic seat (Rabbids VR Ride). And you can forget the old-school classification system of U, PG and 15; in this new era of VR, IMAX is using warnings such as 'physically active', 'extreme heights' and 'casual experience'.
Seats out, headsets in
Like The Grove, the other IMAX VR facilities coming in 2017 will have one of their traditional theatres transformed, with cinema seats ripped out and replaced by between 10 and 14 VR pods.
This story is from the April 2017 edition of Home Cinema Choice.
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This story is from the April 2017 edition of Home Cinema Choice.
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