ILM Immersive & Marvel Studios are releasing "What If...?: An Immersive Story" exclusively on Apple Vision Pro tomorrow, and I had a chance to take an early look and speak with producer and executive producer Sherief Fattouh & as well as technical art director Indira Guerrieri. It's mostly an immersive story with light interactions, but you can't actually die and so it's more about immersing yourself into these worlds with first-person embodiment and exploring around 10 different gesture-based interactions in nearly 50 different interactive moments across the 40 to 45-minute experience. There's also some disembodied moments where you're watching 3D movie cinematics on shards of glass floating in the environment, and so they're also really leaning into how good 3D movies look on the Apple Vision Pro within this experience. Overall, it's blending lots of elements together that feels like something new and a new genre of immersive storytelling that's building upon existing IP, and giving new opportunities to engage with these character's stories as well as their worlds. This is also the first Unreal Engine experience releasing on the Apple Vision Pro store, and so Fattouh told me that ILM Immersive has been making private modifications to get things working. There are features like mixed reality passthrough that are not available yet in Unreal Engine 5.4 yet. Agile Lens' Alex Coulombe told me, "The Epic Games XR team is small so I would I err on the side of assuming no major Vision Pro updates coming soon from Epic. To have the current features working it still requires a source build of Unreal Engine 5.4 (the Epic Games Launcher doesn’t work) and current features include fully immersive mode, hand tracking / gesture recognition, forward and deferred rendering." So hopefully we'll get more on this soon from Epic Games, but at least we know it's possible and we'll start to see more Unreal Engine experiences on the Apple Vision Pro soon. We dive into much more details about the process of creating this experience in this interview. It launches tomorrow exclusively on the Apple Vision Pro, and so be sure to check it out and tune in to learn more about how it was made.
Apple holding back being tied to Unity. Good to see there's a possibility of change... 🙌❤️
Wow!
What an amazing episode! thanks for putting it together!
Emmy Winning Director & Exec Producer: “What If…An Immersive Story” | XR | Experiential | Brand | Creative Development
2moThanks Kent! Looking forward to your review!