We’re all fired up for Christopher Nolan’s save the world space epic, Interstellar. It doesn’t hit cinemas until November 6, but in the meantime I got to experience a little bit of it with the help of an Oculus Rift.
All we know about Interstellar is what we’ve seen in a coupleof trailers that, while lacking in plot detail, will definitely make you want to pay the 13 bucks to see this movie. Basically scientists discover a wormhole and Matthew McConaughey must leave his family in order to explore this connection between space and time, thus saving humanity. Interested? I know I am!
The Interstellar Oculus experience gives you a few minutes to enter into McConaughey’s world, i.e. the space ship that will take him into the great beyond. You sit in a reclining seat, don the Oculus and some headphones, and voila! There you are in your spaceship, in which you’ll fly past the sky. This is obviously a marketing ploy for the movie, but it doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it.
The visuals are so good you actually feel like you’re bouncing through a spaceship. The experience lasts just about three minutes: You enter, look around as you head to the cockpit, and look out into the space beyond. At one point, you get to float around in “zero-gravity,” or rather the Oculus gives you a lighter sensation and your chair moves.
But you feel a bit of that sensation you get when you ride a rollercoaster where your stomach goes up and down. Then the experience ends with you sitting in your seat, strapping in, and getting ready to take off into the wormhole. I could hear a British man in the seat next to me yelling “oh my god, this is amazing” over and over as I got to the control panel. Oculus is definitely the most amazing when you try it for the first time, but I wanted to say, I feel you, man. But I had a headset on.
In any case, once I get to the end, I looked to my left to see if Matthew McConaughey was sitting in the seat next to me. It’s Oculus — anything is possible. Sadly, there was no Matthew McConaughey sitting in the seat next to me. But I still enjoyed my few minutes in space, and it definitely did its job in making me even more excited to see Interstellar.
