I have to admit that this review comes with in incredible amount of bias. While I tried to be as open minded about the experience as possible, my familiarity of the technology prevented me from reviewing the experience with a “totally fresh pair of eyes.” To address this I made sure to go through the experience with my family; wife, son and daughter. I also participated in the experience with the iMyth team. They all provided much needed insights that I was unable to provide.
Like any immersive experience, The Void Secrets of the Empire has plenty of good things and a handful of not-so good things of which I will go in detail in this article. Overall, I believe ILMX and the Void put together a very concrete and enjoyable experience that should make a Star Wars fan jump like a ten year old kid hopped up on sugar. More importantly, they created an experience that is robust and solid enough to satisfy the non-fans. It is a good immersive experience and represents thousands of hours of hard work. I believe this is an attraction that entire families can enjoy without necessarily isolating the old from the young. There is a ten year old age limit restriction. So if you are younger than 10 years you’ll just have to wait until you are old enough to join in the conversation.
I have broken this review into multiple different sections, hopefully detailing the goods and the bads associated with each aspect. I tried to incorporate the views of my co-participants so as to not let this review become too biased. WARNING: There are some spoilers in this review especially when dealing with thematic narrative elements. If you still wish to come to Florida or Anaheim and experience The Secrets of the Empire for yourself then you may wish to skip this review until after you have gone through the attraction.
The experience starts off with you and your team being debriefed by a rebel captain, (Sorry, I can’t remember his name). There was much ambient noise in the debriefing area so I was not able to understand what he was said. The second time through the experience I understood the objective. The participants are a bunch of new recruits who must sneak into an Empire base dressed as stormtroopers and discover the secrets contained inside an empire shipping container. I could not understand the history of the box other that it was our target objective. Each participant needed to scan their wrist band then select a Stormtrooper color on a respective console. This mechanism still has many bugs. The operator needed to restart my family’s team since we were so inept at the scanning and selection process. Being a family friendly experience, we were allowed to continue without really understanding what the main objective was.
From the debriefing room the team was ushered to the “dressing” area where we were equipped with computer, haptic vest and HMD. This part went by very smoothly. It seems that the lessons learned by The Void creating the “Ghostbusters” experience really paid off. The transition went smoothly and quickly. The vests were suspended by retracting wires which made putting them on very easy. The combined weight of computer and batteries did not make them light. The suspension system really helped make putting on the vest an effortless task. The HMD was OK but not outstanding. I had trouble adjusting it to my small head. However, an adequate fit was soon achieved. Interestingly, the HMDS are built to be “flippable” which enable the user to walk around without navigating in virtual reality. I found this feature especially usefully when walking as a group through the tight corridors to the starting area. I thought the HMDs had a limited field of view and were a bit scratchy. However, the devise more than adequately fulfilled its job.
Once the team was instructed to lower their HMD visors, the experience began. Without giving too much away, the team is transported to the empire base where we promptly became lost, found some blaster rifles and needed to blast our way out of the compound. There were some interesting physical props and sets that needed to be interacted with which helped increase the immersion of the experience. If the group works as a team there are enough “activities” to provide every participant with something to do. In typical Disney fashion, the team is miraculously rescued at a critical moment and presumably escapes.
Tracking plays a crucial role in such an immersive experience and the Secrets of the Empire is no different. The tracking system did a great job adjusting the scale of each person’s avatar. This real time re-scaling and subsequent retargeting to conform to the participant’s size was really well done. The HMD position tracking is still not quite perfect as one of my family members became motion sick. Interestingly the participants’ hands were tracked without having to wear tracking gloves. I have a hunch this was achieved by Leap motion sensors imbedded in the HMD. This would probably explain why the hands and arms would occasionally loose track and go out of whack at various head angles or if the experience got too crowded with too many bodies. While an interesting strategy for hand tracking, I think it could have been better achieved with modified MOCAP gloves. Because only the heads, hands and guns were tracked, the torso and leg positions for team mates’ avatars were approximated with limited success. The avatar interpenetration and improper leg, torso and should positions occasionally broke the immersion. Quite a few family members commented that not seeing their own torsos, legs and feet to be highly distracting. To the Void’s and ILMX’s credit, this is still a very hard problem. and this is one of the better attempts of lower body approximation I have seen yet. Maybe lower body representation will also be a feature in the near future.
The models, props, environments and overall rendering were outstanding; probably the best I have seen in an immersive experience yet. The team at ILMX did a fantastic job bringing the environment and its denizens to life. I can’t go on enough to praise the lighting! Glowing and falsely illuminated environments are quite often the results of inexperienced visual teams. The lighting seemed natural and holistically sound. This experience was created by an experienced, Hollywood VFX crew and it shows. My photorealistic awe was not shared by all members of my family who still believed the rendering could have been better. However, they did acknowledge that this was the best experience they had seen yet.
The physical haptics of the experience were also of special note. For the first time in my experience did I notice and appreciate a definite smell component. Since the story world took place on a volcano planet, there was the smell of burning wood. While I would have thought that sulfur would have been a more appropriate smell, the wood smell did an outstanding job immersing the participant into the experience. The haptic heat pockets of the volcano planet were also a nice touch and felt absolutely essential to the experience. The custom made Void Haptic vests were a nice touch. In my humble opinion they do a good job informing the participant when they are getting hit by enemy fire. However, I found it very difficult to judge intensity or direction of the fire. There were many props the participant could touch and interact with. Some of the props were static while others were part of more elaborate mechanisms. The tactile tracking was off for the props including the guns. However, having physical, tangible objects in the experience really aided with the immersion. The walls and platforms were more than adequate to provide sufficient physical reassurance that the participants were immersed in sound physical environment. The average participant usually does not violate their visual boundaries to test for integrity.
While the technical issues can almost be passed off as growing pains of this new media, the story issues are the greatest problems with this experience. While ILMX did a fantastic job bringing this world to life, they also produced a stereotypical Disney theme park experience that seemed to follow the Imagineering template: the participants’ first experience in the new world goes wrong, things continue to decline until a “heavy” shows up and the situation is salvaged by an incredible stroke of good luck or Deus Ex Machina. I found the story to be confusing and irrelevant. The progress was extraordinarily linear and felt tightly bound to rails. The lack of collaborative storytelling was disappointing. In defense of Disney, I understand this is business and throughput is of absolute concern and considering the numbers of people that need to be put through the experience, sacrifices to story must be made. I suppose the storyteller in me was hoping for a bit more than a Star Wars themed shooting gallery.
I have gone through the experience two times now and overall I would have to say I am very impressed. This is a brand new example in a new media type which I think will evolve and become a very import part in all of our lives. My criticisms are really mental notes of the all the obstacles I know need to be resolved. In spite of all these obstacles, The Void and ILMX did an outstanding job creating a gratifying experience that should keep any Star Wars fan feeling like a kid in Santa’s Toy Factory.
