Interstellar Arc Serves Up Alien Foxes, Exoplanets, and VR Carl Sagan

It feels like I’ve been transported into a scene straight out of a science fiction movie.

I’m walking around on a giant centrifuge in space, which I can see the outlines of at the edge of my vision. Beyond it, I see the planet we're orbiting. The pathways I walk on stretch endlessly above and below me, giving me the feeling I’m in an absolutely massive structure. Huge hologram-like characters, each 10 stories tall, occasionally materialize alongside the path to talk to me and the dozen people also on this journey.

Those fellow travelers aren’t computer-generated characters; they’re real humans. We’re all walking around wearing VR headsets in a shared virtual reality space in Las Vegas that can best be described as an amusement park ride for the visual cortex. Everyone else in the group sees the same scene, each from slightly different perspectives as they shuffle around freely.

Interstellar Arc, Vegas’s latest immersive attraction in the city’s Area15 entertainment district, is a stark reimagining of virtual reality within larger physical spaces. The narrative adventure utilizes recent advances in VR, resulting in a forward-looking technological undertaking that likely wouldn’t have been possible even a few years ago.

And as VR technology gets lighter, faster, and more advanced, experiences like these may help drive the future of an industry that’s struggled to find its footing in the mainstream after more than a decade on the commercial market. I went to Las Vegas to step inside Interstellar Arc myself and find out if it might help push virtual reality forward.

Blast Off

The project is the brainchild of Felix & Paul Studios, helmed by cofounders Paul Raphaël, Félix Lajeunesse, and Stéphane Rituit. Raphaël and Lajeunesse spent years as a traditional filmmaking duo, but had already begun to transition to more immersive storytelling formats when they demoed the Oculus Rift headset soon after it hit the market in 2013. They were sold immediately.

“We decided that this was the future of our lives, and that we were going to dedicate ourselves to telling stories in VR,” Raphaël says.

Raphaël says F&P developed the first VR camera that could film in 360 degrees and was involved in a number of early VR experiences. The team worked with the likes of Cirque du Soleil, Steven Spielberg, and even the Obama White House, earning several prime-time Emmy awards along the way. But their work in outer space stood out.

In partnership with NASA, F&P sent three VR cameras to the International Space Station—two inside, plus another attached to an exterior arm to quite literally film from space. From here they developed “Space Explorers: The Infinite,” a touring immersive pop-up meant to bring the space experience to average people in various cities globally. Interstellar Arc is the next evolution of this work.

(I toured the experience at the invitation of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, which covered some of my travel expenses.)

After you buy a ticket for $54 ($39 for kids 8 to 12), you start the Interstellar Arc experience by stepping into a futuristic lobby dressed up as a “spaceport.” As visitors, we are told we’re now in the 25th century and are about to embark on humanity’s first interstellar mission to explore the distant exoplanet Arcadia. We’re each outfitted with our own wireless Meta Quest 3S headsets—each affixed with some noise-canceling headphones—then take our seats inside the virtual Arc for liftoff.

The initial “voyage” segment leverages F&P’s work aboard the ISS to create a wildly realistic view of Earth and our galaxy as we depart. While still in our seats, we enter 262 years of simulated “cryogenic sleep” aboard the Arc, then arrive at what we’re told is a man-made orbital centrifuge city above Arcadia, called Cosmopolis.

This is where the ambulatory part of the journey begins. We disembark into Cosmopolis, a sprawling landscape that’s designed to feel vast. I can see a winding pathway out in front of me, surrounded by a combination of trees, columns, and futuristic structures. The city seems to extend for miles in both my horizontal and vertical vision; I can see outer space and Arcadia, a planet that’s half blue like Earth and half red like Mars, through the city’s translucent skeleton.

With our headsets on, we walk around on pathways enclosed by railings; these railings are real, and designed to be visible within the VR experience. You can hold onto them if you need help orienting and balancing yourself, but they also serve to help direct participants to various parts of the indoor space throughout the experience. But there aren’t always railings, and when those are absent, we’re kept on the virtual path only by being able to see the edges of it, beyond which lies just black nothingness. My eyes tell me I’ll plunge into the abyss if I fall off a pathway, even if my conscious brain knows otherwise. This fun psychological trick creates enough tension to keep me on the path despite the underlying knowledge that I probably don’t really have to.

A virtual alien fox with silver fur serves as a guide as we wander, often walking ahead of us and prompting us with its snout to explore different areas. We can’t really interact with it, which is a bummer given how adorable and pet-able it looks. Basketball-sized hovering orbs appear and serve as achievement checkpoints. My headset tracks how many of these achievements I collect through the experience; I managed 20 of a possible 30. At one point we go “underwater,” a sensation that comes complete with a visual rippling effect as we move around, along with some pretty convincing audio.

Your hands play a role too. A virtual button on my right wrist toggles a camera; one click of the button brings up a viewfinder in the center of my field of view, then a second click snaps a picture I can download later. A button on my left wrist triggers a radio I can use to communicate with the others in my group. If Raphaël, who joined us for our voyage, ever got sick of me using this feature to ping him with incessant questions throughout the hourlong experience, he was kind enough not to mention it.

Hundred-foot-high hologram-like characters periodically appear alongside the paths we walk on (again, everything just feels huge in here), offering us guidance or fun Cosmopolis factoids. One such hologram is a representation of none other than famed astronomer Carl Sagan, who serves as Cosmopolis’ “Librarian” and talks to us about his role in preserving Earth’s knowledge as humanity expands outward. The Sagan hologram also references the Golden Record, a phonograph record sent on the two Voyager spacecraft in 1977 as a way to present Earth’s life and culture to intelligent life beyond the solar system; real-life Carl Sagan was centrally involved in the creation of these discs.

“Carl’s vision and philosophy has always been a huge inspiration,” Raphaël says. “We wanted to include him in this project.”

In fact, F&P got even more than they hoped for when they contacted the Sagan estate.

“When they saw what this project was, they not only were gracious enough to grant us the rights to his likeness, but they helped us put the words in his mouth,” Raphaël says. “These are the words of the closest people that you could possibly have interpret Carl. And they also assisted with the rest of the project, since this was infused at such a fundamental level by Carl’s spirit.”

F&P ran through an extensive casting process to find a look-alike actor for the Sagan character, then used a few different VFX processes in postproduction to achieve the most realistic version they could. They compared the outputs with actual footage and recordings of Sagan to ensure accuracy.

The storyline and experience are impressive, and will surely enchant people across age groups. (Interstellar Arc is for ages 8 and up, and a single adult can supervise up to three children at once.) It’s the underlying tech, however, that may position experiences like Interstellar Arc as a signal of VR’s future.

Eye Candy

At various points on our walk around Cosmopolis, it feels as though we’re walking not just side to side, but also uphill and downhill.

In reality, we’re still inside the same flat, 20,000-square-foot facility we started in. But as I step along the path, it truly feels like the terrain is sloped and curved; when others in my group get ahead of me, I have to look up or at slight angles to see them. It’s a wild sensation, made all the more remarkable by the lack of any accompanying motion sickness (an issue I’ve dealt with in VR).

This is made possible by what Raphaël refers to as “redirection” of the headset’s native visual processing features. The actual technical process is so complex that I still struggle to grasp it even after two extensively simplified breakdowns from Raphaël, but think of it like this: Felix & Paul are subtly rotating the headset’s cameras to the side and upward slightly with each movement, creating a “cheat” for the eyes that makes it feel as though fellow participants are above or below one another when they’re actually on flat ground. (One can only imagine the processing lift involved in maintaining this effect as dozens of participants move around simultaneously.)

Our brains can only handle so much of this, though. Initial versions of redirection included long segments of the effect at once, but that created issues.

“Let’s say for 30 seconds you went in one direction [using the redirection effect],” Raphaël says. “The minute you would turn around to walk in the opposite direction, the cheat that we were doing in one direction is now happening in the other direction, but your brain is used to it being in the first direction. You’d feel very disoriented.”

Through 18 months of trial and error, F&P got around this problem in part by shortening the redirection windows. We only spent a brief amount of time walking on the sloped segments, plus moving on what Raphaël calls a “sinuous path” that includes an equal amount of left and right redirection.

I contacted Andy Etches, founder of VR company Rezzil, a major player in the sports VR space, to get his take on this headset innovation.

“That’s the first I’ve heard of that approach anywhere,” says Etches. “You’ve seen people use treadmills and omnidirectional things, which feel like falling more than walking. Allowing someone to walk naturally and altering their perception of how they’re walking or what they’re seeing is a really interesting approach.”

Also notable is F&P's use of the physical space. Twenty thousand square feet isn’t small—about the same as a midsize hotel ballroom—but visitors move quite a bit during the experience. Our headsets are equipped with a step counter; I managed over 500 in the hourlong experience, which for me is about a quarter-mile. I got a chance to view the space with my headset off, and it didn’t quite feel big enough for that.

And it isn’t. Raphaël tells me our group actually went around the room three full times as part of a “circuit,” facilitated by a combination of railings and strategic prompts—the fox, light-up visual cues—that kept us moving along a preset path.

“We now have a way to re-map physical space into dramatically different virtual space, which is great for using less physical space,” Raphaël says. “In the future you can imagine a world where companies or people have ‘holodecks’ where they can experience entertainment or work or training or whatever you might want to do in a virtual environment. You will, using this type of technique, simply need less physical space than you normally would.”

This kind of spatial manipulation is part of VR’s core value proposition, but the tech has often lacked proper vehicles to bring it to life. One can only make a living room feel so big in VR before the user runs into a wall.

The physical space presents other technical challenges. One is the volume of people: Interstellar Arc can accommodate up to 170 participants at once, Raphaël says, quite a crowd even in a room this large.

That can be an issue for typical VR headsets, which rely on cameras and sensors to triangulate their position within a room. Those devices lock onto fixed surfaces when you’re alone, but it’s much harder with more than 100 people roaming around. “You might start drifting in space and bouncing around, disappearing and reappearing somewhere else,” Raphaël says.

F&P uses an intriguing workaround that utilizes an additional camera built into the top of the headset that points upward at an infrared light grid spread across the entire room’s ceiling. The grid functions almost as a “giant QR code,” as Raphaël puts it, helping each headset maintain its precise location by locking onto the unique pattern.

Etches says he’s seen similar anti-latency approaches for large-scale VR programs, but typically using markings on the wall or floor.

The feature seems to work, at least in my limited experience. I never saw any drifting or bouncing around from any fellow group members, though in fairness there were nowhere near 170 people in the room at the time.

Looking Forward

With new consumer VR headset models arriving each year and lighter, more nimble options on the horizon, Raphaël knows Interstellar Arc won’t be able to rely on the same tech for long. He says F&P have already pushed the Quest 3S “as far as we possibly could,” and that the team will adapt the experience as new models arrive. “You have this technology that’s just barely now getting to the point where it’s good enough, very recently, and it still can get a lot better,” he says.

Etches believes VR has already been edging toward the mainstream in recent years. But he thinks experiences like Interstellar Arc will only fuel the fire by creating a perfect setting for fantasy, historic, or futuristic viewing experiences. “You can’t do it any other way really, can you? Placing someone in a different place in time, without moving them, and doing it with 170 people at once,” he says.

The VR experience of Interstellar Arc isn’t one that can be easily recreated at home. The team also hasn’t announced plans to install the experience in other locations, so you have to go to Vegas to go through it. To Etches, though, attractions like these will help drive wider VR adoption, even for games played in the living room.

“My experience over the last nearly 10 years of working in VR is that the minute someone tries it, they go, ‘Oh, this is amazing,’” he says. “If they have an exciting experience and they get to do something they couldn’t do in real life, they will absolutely go on and experience VR more again.”

“If we can find a factory that’s going to put 170 people through an amazing experience every hour of the day, I’m all for it. Because that’s just going to introduce more people and build more adoption.”