Devices
OTOY Launches Groundbreaking Multi-Hour Star Trek Spatial Experience for the Apple Vision Pro
Story Highlights
In partnership with Paramount Game Studios and The Gene Roddenberry Estate, OTOY unveiled the ‘The Archive’ for the Apple Vision Pro – now on the App Store in tandem with the release of Apple’s new spatial computing platform. The app marks a major evolution of the Roddenberry Archive project, which had over 4-million visitors during a limited 3-week preview on the web in April 2023.
The new Archive app immerses fans in nearly two-hours of groundbreaking Star Trek spatial experiences built exclusively for the Apple Vision Pro, allowing them to explore hundreds of fully realised locations, artefacts and unique items – spanning every Star Trek TV show and film across the franchise’s nearly 60-year history.
With only gaze and touch, Vision Pro users can transport themselves instantly through gorgeous immersive 3D environments traversing between different eras of Star Trek from The Cage pilot to Star Trek: Lower Decks.
They can inspect each item on Captain Kirk’s shelf, take a seat at Quark’s bar on the Deep Space Nine Promenade, or launch a shuttle from the U.S.S. Enterprise-D’s hangar bay. With Apple SharePlay, a visit through the world of Star Trek can also become a shared social experience that can be live streamed with friends and family on.
Created exclusively for the Vision Pro app, a select number of Star Trek assets are available as downloadable holographic objects which can be placed in the user’s home environment. These models and sets can be shrunk or expanded from life size to dollhouse scales while rendering at a fidelity and quiescence never before possible on consumer hardware.
Audiences can play with the size and scale of the legendary U.S.S. Enterprise – enabling them to experience what it is like to walk around the original 11-foot physical U.S.S. Enterprise model on display at the Smithsonian, or have the in-universe 1:1 life size 1000-foot ship fly overhead.
OTOY concept videos and documentary films from recent Roddenberry Archive releases have been remastered specifically for the Vision Pro and are featured in the app along with newly restored footage from the Roddenberry Archive – including previews of the unabridged interviews with George Lucas and Stan Lee exploring Gene Roddenberry’s influence on Star Wars and Marvel.
“Today’s release of the Archive app for the Vision Pro marks a major step towards realising Gene Roddenberry’s Holodeck” said CEO of OTOY, Jules Urbach. “Through Apple’s breakthrough Vision Pro spatial computing platform, we can bring audiences back in time as if they were there on set during the making of Star Trek for the first time, with full visual immersion and historical accuracy” added Urbach.
The Archive features three new documentary featurettes including an interview with Walter Koenig, who played Ensign Pavel Chekov in Star Trek: The Original Series and a two-part interview with David Gerrold, discussing his involvement writing for Star Trek across many different eras and series.
The app’s spatial content and streams were created by artists and studios using the Render Network and OTOY’s cutting-edge GPU rendering tools, bringing the highest levels of unbiased path-traced realism at unprecedented resolutions, powered by thousands of decentralised GPUs in the cloud.
The app allows artists using OTOY’s tools to load their own immersive media creations on the Vision Pro and share it with others.
Featured in the Archive’s native Vision Pro spatial content are 1-meter by 1-meter light field cubes that are displayed at 90-frames-per-second in 4K resolution per eye, pushing the boundary on visual fidelity. Unbiased rendering and light field baking enable audiences to experience Star Trek worlds with fully path traced real time lighting, including dynamic glossy reflections and shadows, bringing revolutionary levels of photorealism to immersive content.
“Through our multi-decade collaboration with OTOY, we have been working to push the frontiers of immersive technology to fulfil my father’s legacy, creative intent, and ideas in ways that can be experienced today and by generations yet to come.” said Rod Roddenberry, President of Roddenberry Entertainment. “The Roddenberry Archive, as an immersive experience on the Apple Vision Pro, is a remarkable milestone in realising my father’s vision for the Holodeck. This release also fulfils one of my mother’s greatest wishes. She recorded her phenoms in 2008 before her passing, to have her voice live on in posterity. It is deeply moving for me to be able to have her voice now narrate portions of the archive” added Roddenberry. “I am also pleased that the archive can bring to life both published and unrealised influential narrative works from Star Trek’s rich literary history, covering my father’s one and only Star Trek novel for the Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979 through the decades of books and comics that subsequently followed.”
The Archive’s latest release of navigable spatial content can be viewed as a live 2D stream on the web at https://roddenberry.x.io.
For a limited time, the complete experience is available for free on both the web and the Vision Pro. Later this year, OTOY and Paramount will offer users unlimited viewing time and a-la-carte access to all current and future immersive Star Trek 3D experiences released through The Archive.