If you fancy yourself an ideal candidate for the Rebel Alliance, you definitely want to put a visit to the new VR experience Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire on your bucket list. The location-based immersive adventure from The VOID and ILMxLAB offers fans a next-level, full-sensory experience being dropped into an Alliance mission to infiltrate an Imperial base and work with other players to neutralize the Empire’s latest threat — all in an untethered virtual environment.
To reach the deepest possible immersion, the creators turned to Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4 real-time solution. ILMxLAB’s VFX Supervisor Ben Snow explains: “Unreal was essential to creating Secrets of the Empire because we really wanted to lift the visual bar on this project and make it as immersive as possible. There are a lot of components going into this, all of which have to be viewable at 90 frames per second in stereo by every single person in the experience.”
Chief Creative Officer at The VOID, Curtis Hickman, adds: “We were expecting to have to cut back on certain features and post-processing effects in order to be able to run at the required frame rate, and to be able to run on our hardware — yet, Unreal made it all possible. We were able to not only get the visuals we were looking for but also a little bit extra as well, to make that Star Wars universe really come alive.”
Check out the video below and read more about the project over at the Unreal Engine Blog.
