There are few directors who can lay claim to creating crucial pillars of geek culture in the way Ridley Scott can. The Alien and Blade Runner director has now gone on record saying that he is working on a new virtual reality experience.
It’s hard to imagine the sci-fi world without Alien or Blade Runner. Two pioneering, genre-busting movies that created future worlds that were almost tangible. Alien of course led to Aliens, directed by Jim Cameron, and a sci-fi movie franchise giant was born.
Now, in an interview with Yahoo, Scott has stated that not only is he working on a new virtual reality experience but that, in his mind at least “…you’d be stupid not to.”
The director’s latest film, the best received film in some time, The Martian, tells the story of Mark Watney, a Botanist on an expedition to Mars who’s assumed dead by his crew-mates and left behind, marooned. The film is to get a 15 minute virtual reality experience, one created by Fox initiative Innovation Lab, who recently announced a partnership with Oculus to bring video content to that company’s VR platform.
Details are slim on precisely what Scott might be working on for VR, but it may well be something we can all enjoy in our homes. “I’m in one now — I shouldn’t say which [movie]. People say, “You can’t have the theater with a room full of people with helmets on.” Therefore, it points to me as probably a domestic experience, where you can sit in a room like this and [walk] through a whole universe by yourself, and then pass it on to your family. Or get two or three helmets and do the same thing. Though you’d walk into each other, so you better go in another room.”
We can but hope, because frankly, the thought of a Ridley Scott created virtual reality experience set in the world of Blade Runner, a sequel to which he’s working on right now, makes us a little weak at the knees.
You can already get a taste for what VR can bring to Scott’s work. Check out this Blade Runner VR experience which painstakingly reproduces lead character Deckard’s apartment from the film.
