Asteroids! VR Experience Review

VR Storytelling
As I get further along in my Udacity VR Nanodegree, I’ve been spending a lot of time playing around with VR and AR apps. I find it inspiring to see the clever experience other people are making.

“Interactive” VR experiences are getting all the love and attention at the moment. But, I feel there'll also be a lot of growth in more passive storytelling experiences. Think stories that you watch from inside of the world. Maybe I’m biased by my background in animated film and TV development, but I think some of the most talked about VR experiences will be with great stories.

There's a great VR Storytelling company in Los Angeles called Within. They have a lot of great content in their app. Everything from branded interactive shorts, to episodic cartoons.

Asteroids!
Asteroids! is an animated short film about a day in the life of a cute alien family. A husband, wife, and “dog” are traveling together through space. They go about their daily lives until the universe throws a wrench in things.

It's a well designed experience, with production quality on par with today’s animated features.

The characters in Asteroids! are what you’d imagine a cute alien family might look like. They're round and squeezable with very expressive features.

The environments were very well lit. The multiple lighting setups made the environment feel "true" and added to the immersiveness of the story.

The story was funny and sweet. A man and his dog... and wife. While the relationships are obvious, they're comforting in the predictability. It would be a perfect setup for an animated space sitcom.

The camera position was static for the length of the film. But, I never felt out of place. I was always a part of the action. They used the “dog” as a guide for where to look. It was a fairly effective tool for getting me to look at the right place at the right time. Though there were a couple of times that I felt a bit lost.

Asteroids! is a fun(ny) VR experience. It’s a simple story, about simple aliens, doing simple things, until the universe tries to simply ruin things.