#1808：「Smithsonian Starstruck」— Fever が手がける没入型教育LBE

The Voices of VR Podcast. an immersive experience. So this is a piece by Fever. They do all sorts of ticketing of events, but also now getting into location-based entertainment. And so this is the collaboration with Smithsonian and one of their research entities to take science about space and start to turn it into a whole kind of like immersive adventure. So in terms of center of gravity of air, earth, air, because it's very pedagogical. You're learning a lot. There's a lot of facts and information from scientists. There's also text that's overlaid in a lot of it. So you end up in this very information-dense type of experience where you just feel like you're learning a lot of facts and data and information from these scientists about space.

And the Earth element being just that it's very immersive. You feel like you're kind of walking into these immersive spaces. They're really transporting you into other planets and being able to interact and see different models of these satellites. And also kind of fire element dimensions where you're able to actually roam and walk around, which was actually really nice. And just a really nice way of guiding the audience by having different reflections on the floor. It gave a lot of indications for where you can actually move your body through the space. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Elliot happened on Monday, September 7th, 2026 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in. My name is Elliot Mizorak, and I'm the director of Smithsonian Starstruck and Immersive Experience. I've been working in the space for 12 years. I started roughly around 2014 making the early days of 360 video. We were doing a lot of commercials. I was just fascinated by immersive media in general, so I threw myself into it.

I had a very different career at the time. I was working in renewable energy, actually, and private equity. and when I saw some early demos, actually one of Felix and Paul's, their piece called Strangers, I saw something, the Beck 360 video, I don't know if you remember that one. Oh, yeah, it's very early, yeah. And then I just started playing with all the dev kits available at the time and 3D printing GoPro rigs and making 360 videos. And, you know, I've been in it ever since, and I've done, you know, just about everything you can imagine from, you know, AR applications for museums, training simulations for medical, military medical people, I did a project with the Cleveland Clinic's heart surgery team. But around 2018, I began to focus largely on photogrammetry and creating digital twins and working in Game Engine. And then in 2019, we got our first big break after we had scanned King Tut's tune. We were tapped by a guy named John Norman, who was doing a physical artifact exhibition of the real things from Egypt.

And he was taking those to the Saatchi Gallery. and he heard that I had a 3D model of King Tut's tomb and he asked me to build a virtual reality sidecar to that exhibition that would take guests into the tomb, you know, after they'd seen the physical artifacts. And it was like a smash hit. It began my career working in cultural heritage, virtual reality, and I've been in it ever since. Nice. Very cool. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space. So I've had a long, windy career path, as I think most of us have in the space. But, you know, right out of college, I took a job with the government. I was living in D.C. and I was working at the Department of Energy doing renewable energy, green building design stuff. And then I went into private equity doing the same, you know, making investments into green businesses. And then we had the financial crisis around this time. And so I needed to find a new gig because, you know, they weren't making altruistic investments on Wall Street anymore. And so I went back to my hometown of D.C.

and I partnered up with some childhood friends of mine or mentors, really, that are much older than me, were the guys from this band, Thievery Corporation. And they owned all the restaurants in D.C. And so I thought it would just be like a summer gig while I found what I was going to do next. And I ended up working with them for five years, six years. And we opened all these wonderful restaurants in D.C. and it was completely unexpected. It was fun. I learned a lot about business. you know venues and things that that are useful to me today but it was never really what I wanted to be doing and so when those started to hit I took some of the profits I was making from those bars and around that time I was seeing the first demos that I just mentioned things like Beck's music video and the first Felix and Paul you know strangers and the 360 videos that they were doing and I started to make my own stuff and that's when I transitioned out of that and I've been full-time in VR since 2014, 2015. Nice. And so for people who haven't seen Smithsonian's

Starstruck, maybe you could just describe what is the experience? What is it about? Yeah, Smithsonian put out an RFP in 2024, and it wasn't to do VR. It was just to explore the commercialization of the brand of Smithsonian. And they were taking inbound, you know, anything. It could have been drone shows. It could have been physical artifact-based exhibitions. And we submitted an application to do an LBE immersive VR and one. And it wasn't necessarily about space. It could have been about any of the Smithsonian museums. And there were a few different topics they were throwing around. There was natural history. There was an experience about the civil rights movement. There were several. And we sort of met with directors from each of those museums. And when we met with SAO, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, We clicked. You know, I had always, I was never a scientist or an astrophysicist or anything like that, but I love space. I love sci-fi and I love Hollywood movies, Interstellar and Gravity and Arrival. These are all like really interesting things to me.

And I love spheres and I love space explorers that were done in our medium here. And so we just, you know, we're like, this is it. Let's make a space movie with SAO, with Smithsonian. And we embarked on that journey about two years ago. So, you know, deciding what story to tell was a really difficult thing because you have the scientific rigor of the Smithsonian. And so they demand, you know, everything has to be accurate. And we also don't want to make this feel like you're sitting in an astrophysics lecture. We have, you know, my predecessors that have done amazing works like spheres and space explorers and now interstellar, which wasn't out at the time. And so we want to make something distinctly different. And then we have Fever that wants to sell a bunch of tickets and build a business around LBEVR. And so my job, you know, as the director was to thread the needle between all those different things and tell a story. And so when we began to research, it was like the things that jumped out at me first were one in 2017.

I had seen Kusama's Infinity Mirror Room exhibit. It was actually at the Hirshhorn, the Smithsonian Hirshhorn. And it, you know, left an impression on me. I didn't know really what to make of it at the time, but I would later learn that it's almost impossible to describe the size and scale of space intellectually, even with a PhD in math or physics, like it's unfathomable. But with a piece of art like she made, you know, you can touch someone emotionally and show them a bit of what maybe infinity looks like. And so I had that in my back pocket. And then I remember watching 60 Minutes, and they were showing some James Webb photos of the deep field image. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it just looks like a bunch of multicolored polka dots. They point into what they thought was going to be an empty part of space, and they discovered there was incredible amounts of stuff in that deep space, right? Exactly. It's just a square inch of space, and it has roughly 3,000 galaxies in it. Each one has billions of stars, you know, just like our Milky Way, maybe even bigger.

And so one of the first kernels I had for Starstruck was, let's make a Kusama's infinity room that's scientifically accurate using the deep field image. And we did that. That's the third scene in the experience, and it was much easier said than done. We had to sit with an astrophysicist named Ritu and Laura Brenneman and Randall Smith for months to place those galaxies. But we did it, and that was great. And one of the other early things that jumped out were these telescopes, you know, the Hubble, the James Webb, the Chandra. You know, you see images of them and they look kind of like tin cans. You know, you don't really know how big they are, what they're doing. And the more you learn about them, they're physically fascinating. They're like the sizes of school buses and tennis courts. They're huge. They run on the power of like a couple of hair dryers. and they last for, you know, the Hubble's been live for 36 years. They have the bandwidth of, let's say, a 4 or 5G phone. So these are just incredible marvels of engineering.

And then the more interesting thing is that they don't just see far. When you look through the Hubble or the James Webb, you're looking back in time. So this idea of telescopes as time machines, like some of them can take pictures of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. So this was mind-blowing to me. I still, frankly, don't fully understand it. So I had the Kusama's Infinity Room thing, then I had this vehicle, which in Starstruck you ride these telescopes kind of like spaceships to the different galaxies. Then I sat with the team at SAO and were like, what's our story here? Who's the main character? It's not our solar system. It's not our galaxy in Milky Way. These are sort of irrelevant. I mean, they're just specks in a huge sea. The main character in the universe is stars. Planets like Earth are just little byproducts of stars. They're like rubble that comes in the aftermath and the forming of stars. Stars like our sun, our sun is quite regular. There's a very average star.

And there's trillions of stars and trillions of galaxies. And stars are sort of the lifeblood of the universe. So we landed on this idea of the birth, life, and death of stars using the vehicle of telescopes to get us around to them. And that's what Starstruck is about. Nice. Beautiful. Yeah. So I guess you talked a little bit around the journey and the process of trying to find out what the story was going to be. One of the challenges with immersive media is that it's always interdisciplinary. So you have the script, the spatial parts, interactive parts. And so often you have to kind of iterate and add one or the other. And so with this piece, did you start with writing out the script or did you find that you needed to do the well building and make sure that the experiences that you were imagining we're going to actually work in terms of, you know, because space can be very abstract and it's very decontextualized in a way that is, like most of it, is empty. So you have a challenge of, like, how do you actually ground it in something that is human scale? Or even if it's a star, then you have to, like, play with scale in a way that we can get some sense of things

relative to comparing it to other objects that we're more familiar with, like this object is this many suns or whatnot. So there's a lot of that kind of comparison. So when you're starting to build this out, I'm just curious where you began, whether it was some world building, whether it was a script, a little bit of both. So it's a great question. So we began with a rough treatment that landed us on that story of telescopes as time machines, birth, life and death of stars. Now, where are we taking the viewers? We're going to start at our star, the sun. Then we're going to go to where stars are born, you know, in this famous image of the pillars of creation. Then we're going to watch a star die in a supernova. And we take people to, we picked a famous star, Beetlejuice, which is in the shoulder of Orion's belt, but also made famous by the many movies, the Tim Burton movies. And then to the aftermath of a death star is either a form of a neutron star or a black hole. Anyway, so we kind of roughed out the beats of where we wanted to go.

And then we ended up from there with roughly 10 or 12 scenes. and that's where we really dove in with the scientists at SAO and actually got data. You know, everything you're seeing in Starstruck, the Pillars of Creation, for example, we took point cloud data from James Webb, inputted that into Unreal, and then painted it. So it's not just, you know, like an artistic rendition. It is the shape of that star nebula So I would love to say that it was a very linear process from treatment to script But the truth is we were editing the scripts up until two three weeks before we launched the movie, we started with a great idea, we built the scenes, we found some of them couldn't work because of bandwidth issues in our headset and had to throw them away or replace them. And we were just kind of working with the team the whole way to adhere to that original idea of the birth, life, and death into stars, but deal with the constraints of our medium. And yeah, I mean, we, you know, it was just everybody working so hard on the fly, you know,

for two years. It was, it was really a team effort. And we did do, you know, one practical step in the process was we created a gray box, which was just, you know, no color in Unreal, being able to walk through an empty space with just gray spheres and then work on things like pacing and timing. But other than that, it was like we were building the plane while we were flying it type thing, to be honest. Yeah, I think that's a very iterative process that I think a lot of folks end up in order to fuse all the things together. And so you mentioned Fever. Was Fever there from the very beginning of the pitch, or when did they come on board to be involved? And were they helped to produce, or were they just distributing? and just give me a bit of context of who Fever is and at what point they came in on the project. So I actually merged my company with Fever in 2024. So like I said, I've been working in this immersive media space for 12 years. They saw the work I was doing. They wanted to enter the space, and we joined forces. So Fever was there from day one. When we won the RFP, part of what was attractive to Smithsonian was that we had the network of Fever,

you know the marketing and ticketing backbone you know some existing venues and relationships and so fever was there from day one and they were a great champion of this medium and this project and so i can't thank them enough for the the support they gave us having said that they let us do our thing you know they knew that we knew what we were doing and so i brought in tomas barnas from overhead 4d who's you know the best in the business in my opinion and my longtime collaborator and you know he's a guy that just gets all things game engine and lbevr he understands both the creative side we speak a shorthand together that is you know i haven't found with anybody else and then he knows the technical side really well getting volumes of hundreds of people through a day minimizing bugs tracking issues and all that boring stuff and so fever was there from day one they're they champion this whole thing and they continue to do so and they're helping us with ticketing, marketing, and distribution in a sort of a way that Netflix does with its creators of,

you know, letting them create. They were great with just giving us the space we needed to make a great movie. Yeah, I've been hearing a little bit about Fever. I haven't had a chance to have anyone on. I actually met someone from Fever here, chat with them very briefly, but maybe just give a bit more context for what Fever is and when they came about and what they're doing in the industry. So Fever is a global ticketing and marketing platform. It's sort of like Ticketmaster. One of the ways they describe themselves is like Netflix for live events. So if you download the Fever app, any city you're in, you type in Barcelona or Venice or Chicago, and they'll come up with thousands of events happening in that city. And so they usually work with outside producers that have events, whether it's sports, music, you know, culinary. I mean, they're putting on Formula One next week in Madrid. They're doing huge, you know, football, soccer for the American audience, you know, FC Barcelona, Madrid. They're doing all sorts of stuff. But it's like a one-stop shop where you can go find anything happening in a city and buy a ticket to it and go to it.

Now, having said that, just like Ticketmaster has Live Nation and they produce some of their own events, Fever has an arm called Fever Originals, where when they see what's going on, to see what's working based on all the data that they gather. Sometimes they double down and produce some stuff in-house that they like. And in this case, they saw what was going on in our space, in LBE, and brought me in to create some experiences. Now, having said that, they still work with third parties all the time. There's a lot of people at this festival that work with Fever as well, that Fever tickets. But in some instances, like in ours, they produce some things in-house. And they're really a great champion, you know, in our space, which needs Fevers really to help develop our business model and scale it out globally. And so they've just been great, you know, with helping the LBE scene. Yeah, I think I heard you say that you merged with Fevers. Does that mean that you were acquired or just that you're collaborating with them? No, we were acquired. So my team was a small, we had a small production company and we were working in things like I mentioned before, like a museum-based virtual reality

experiences. I had done many of the seven wonders of the world, you know, lots of Egyptian tombs and Machu Picchu and things like this. And we had worked with a lot of museums and we were doing seated experiences, not free roam at the time. And they basically came to us and said, Hey, can you do that thing that you're doing in this format and free room where we could sell more tickets to it? We could get more eyeballs on what you're doing because we like it. And we said, yes of course and and so we formally you know we joined fever we're a part of fever now in 2024 okay that's really uh helpful to hear a bit more context and so i know with a lot of these lbe experiences they'll have a little bit of an exclusive time with like certain locations is that kind of the case here where because it's smithsonian is it only playing in certain areas in dc or is this something that is also like being licensed out to go and travel around above and beyond what's happening in D.C.? So it's very much going to be global. It's not just in D.C. We did a pilot in one of our home countries in London

at the London Science Museum just before this festival, and it's been incredible. You know, we are smashing LBE sales records, and we found that this is a great pairing in museums, in places where people and families go to learn and to see whatever museum they're going to see. this is a great side card, just like we did at the Sashi Gallery in 2019. So we want to do more of that. We want to take Starstruck to every museum that will have us all over the world. And then Fever also has a network of LBE locations all over the world. So we're going to take Starstruck anywhere and everywhere we can. But we're really leaning into this museum angle because it fits so well into not just science museums, but really any museums. Because there's a human story there. There's an artistic story. And so we're even talking to natural history museums and art museums as well. You know, science museums are our sweet spot. Yeah, that makes sense. And there's certainly a lot of science and scientific information in this piece. And you mentioned before I went into the piece, you were pointing out all the collaborators that you had.

And there's quite a number of different institutions, Smithsonian. And so maybe you could just talk a bit about the scientific advisors and what that process was like for you as you were writing the script in collaboration with other writers, but also with this advisory group of scientists? Yeah, it's a good question. So the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory is our official partner on this. I didn't know about it because they don't have a museum on the mall in D.C. So it's a part of the Smithsonian, but it's a part that not many people know about. It's affiliated with Harvard. It's based out of Cambridge. And it's very much an active astrophysical laboratory. They do a lot of the work on Hubble and James Webb and studying black holes. They're involved in real-time, heavy-duty astrophysical research with NASA and ESA and all the biggest space agencies in the world. So we got paired with a team there, and this concerns you as a director. What kind of subject matter expert are you going to get? Are they going to be difficult? Are they going to understand that you're trying to create a commercial experience here

that adheres to science but also has to sell tickets? and it was like love at first sight. You know, we got paired with Dr. Randall Smith, Dr. Laura Brenneman, and, you know, several other PhD candidates working with us, but they were the two leads, and it was great. You know, they had never worked on anything like this, and we obviously did not know much about astrophysics. And so we worked together hand-in-hand like a team from the beginning, and it was just great. You know, we would have an idea, they'd say, that's crazy, that's not how that works, or no, that's real, that's a good idea, that's a cool story. Or we would see one of these amazing photos you see coming from James Webb that sort of looks like an Apple screensaver. It's like, what am I looking at here? And Laura or Randall would just explain it in great detail. And I would talk to them about, you know, tell me more, tell me more. What happens after that star explodes? Then what? And then we would try to pull the story elements out of that. And that's how we created the script.

And then when we got into, when we had the script and we got into the, you know, the meat of creating the experience, it was very hands-on. You know, it was them sharing data, you know, 3D modeling point cloud data. It was them, you know, taking really heavy things. Like there's a point in Starstruck where you get to use an Iron Man laser coming out of your hand to shoot it into the event horizon of a black hole. And any way you point it, you know, if you point it directly away from the event horizon, it bends back in. And not only does it bend, but the colors change, you know, the red, green, yellow, blue, as they approach the event horizon. That was, you know, real scientific research that Laura had worked on and I believe published. And we were able to put it in as a fun interactive feature. That was a really cool moment, by the way. Yeah, so it's just, you know, countless things like this. I mean, Randall's here with us now at the festival, and we've just become a family, and they were just great to work with, and, you know, I can't speak highly enough about them.

They came down to our level, and we stepped up to theirs, and the best compliment I think I got out of this whole showing of Starstruck was from Laura, who said, you know, I've spent decades of my life working on this stuff, and most of the stuff I look at is quite boring. It's just numbers, you know, and my friends and family really have no idea what I'm doing. And you've created something that visualizes it scientifically accurately that, you know, we can share with the world. And I just thought that was beautiful. Yeah, wasn't it in Interstellar where they started to visualize the black hole for the first time? And because I know that they had a bunch of like computer graphics people kind of visualize it and that it's the same type of depiction that we see in your piece. But yeah, it kind of took a film to start to really visualize what it was going to look like. Is that right? So not only is that right, that is in Starstruck and is spot on. So Interstellar was the only example, I think, of a big Hollywood movie that got it really right.

So they used an astrophysicist named Kip Thorne, and he was Nolan's subject matter expert. And they spent months, you know, I don't know, maybe years working on that black hole. And it's the best example of a scientifically accurate black hole in cinema. And so for that one, Laura actually just said, you know, look at Interstellar. Like they did a lot of the heavy lifting. As far as we were using a different black hole, mind you. We were using Sag A-star. But as far as the accretion disc and the spinning and the colors, she was like, that's going to be your best visual reference. And as one of my favorite movies, that was no problem. I was able to watch that several times, and that was the beginnings of our Sagittarius Day star scene. I had the thought that I was like, oh, no, I'm going to get out, and it's going to be 15 years later because, you know, when you're that close to a black hole, then time dilation happens. I hope you pull Randall aside and talk to him about that. He'll poke some holes in that. Okay. Yeah, that part may or may not be true. I choose to believe that it is, but Randall will talk to you about that after the interview.

Okay. Nice. So maybe it's worth kind of breaking down the rough structure of the piece. I think you mentioned a little bit of the lifetime of a star, but when we first enter into the piece, we're kind of introduced to our tour guide or docent of sorts or he's guiding us through, and we're on Earth in a way that we're at an observatory, and then we kind of begin and end on Earth on an observatory. But we kind of take an adventure through all these different locations throughout the piece. So maybe just talk about how you were thinking about in terms of chapters or acts or episodes, like how you break up, and just kind of recap what kind of journey you take people on in this piece. Sure. I mean, I'll just take you through the experience a bit. So we begin at the Whipple Observatory, which is run by SAO, and it's in Arizona. And this was a ground telescope that was first launched in 1979 As we say in the experience it cracked the sky wide open It did a lot of the early 3D modeling of the universe And so it was a very important telescope at the time

and still is, still operational, still has a function. But before that, mention Galileo's telescope. And before that, we talk about ancient peoples, you know, just looking up at the sky, you know, people's quest to just understand what's going on up there. The MMT at Whipple was a very important chapter in that history. And so we start you there, and then we take you through a magical door in Whipple and take you into space. And we briefly show you the Big Bang, but we didn't want to linger on that because there's been other VR experiences that have done things on the Big Bang. And so from the Big Bang, we let it happen. It's sort of almost just like a transition. And we put you in that Kusama-inspired galaxy room. And so you're standing inside a real one-for-one deep-field image that you can walk around and touch galaxies and learn how far they are from Earth, learn how many stars are in them. And frankly, I wish it was longer. You know, this could be its own experience because it's a fun moment, you know, where you're just playing in the macro.

Yeah, just to clarify, because I've been in the Kusama room, and it's a bit of you see a mirror and you see reflections, and it's kind of like reflected out. But I guess in this infinity room, it's like literally kind of going off into infinity in some ways where you're kind of walking through some galaxies, but I didn't see a reflection of myself. So I'm just trying to get a sense of, when you say the infinity room, I think of this kind of repeating box that goes on forever, but here you're just kind of going off into the void of space. Is that right? That's true. I mean, we're standing inside space, which is perhaps infinite, perhaps not. That's an astrophysical debate. I only mean to say that the Kusama piece inspired me and that it was an artistic inspiration. It was by no means like a replication of that, but just the idea of trying to get people to feel the scale of space. But we don't have reflections. We don't have mirrors or anything like that. You're just standing in, you know, as she says, she talks about polka dots and we're just one little polka dot. And I believe that's what she's trying to express.

Then, you know, the deep field image sort of scientifically, you know, leaves us with that impression. And then our galaxy room is a bit of a mishmash of the two. And so it's just to say that our, like, I'll give you an example. Our Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years across. That means it takes light, the fastest thing in the universe, 100,000 years to cross it. It's massive. It's tremendously massive. You know, if something happens on the edge of it, we won't know about it for 100,000 years. And it's really just a speck in a sea of billions and trillions of these galaxies, each containing trillions of stars like our sun. And so what we're trying to display in that scene is a bit of that size and scale. It's very difficult to do and to understand, but we do our best. And it's, if for nothing else, fun and beautiful. So we take you from there, and then we dive into our Milky Way galaxy. Again, we didn't want to spend a ton of time there, as fears did and other experiences have. But we want to start you off, ground you in things that you understand.

And so we take you to our star, our sun. We teach you a bit about that. And you meet this thing called the Parker Solar Probe, which is an instrument that floats closest to the sun of anything that we have. And it reads the sun. And the sun has weather. The sun has a particular sound. The sun is very dynamic. You know, it's having these solar flares all the time that disrupt things on Earth, like our satellite signals. And they're massive. They're 30 times the size of the Earth. If you imagine like a volcano eruption happening 30 times the size of Earth on a regular basis, the Parker Solar Probe is tracking all that and sending that data back. And so we worked with that office out of John Hopkins and NASA and Randall and Laura again, and we show you that vehicle. It flies over your head and plays the sound of the sun for you. Another thing that I thought was cool is, you know, when we were all in science class as kids, you think of the solar system sort of rotating on a flat plane like a dinner plate. And it's very much not doing that.

It's orbiting in 3D, and this is something where our medium of immersive can show you, like corkscrewing all around you incredibly fast. It's moving at 800,000 kilometers per hour, all the planets at different distances from the sun. And we show you that briefly. And then we sort of wrap up our solar system scene as we don't want to linger there, and we introduce you to the Hubble telescope. You know, you board it, you get to play with it, learn about it, feel its scale. and then take you to its most famous image, one of its most famous, which was the Pillars of Creation. That's where we use a bit of magic. And the Hubble very much does not fly, you know, to places like the Pillars of Creation. But SAO let us take that artistic liberty and we take you to the pillars and we teach you about them, which are incredible, but then take you inside of one of the pillars to witness a star being born, you know, which is a one in 10,000 year event. that you get a front row seat for. And you learn that when stars are born, it's not just stars being born, it's planets too.

You know, like when a star is born, it has this gravitational pull like our sun does, and it pulls all of the asteroid debris that's happening around it, and it begins to clump together and form planets. And so when a star is born, its planets are born with it. and from there we take you to an exoplanet named Janssen, which is made largely of diamonds, and we show you how lucky we are on Earth to be sort of in our Goldilocks zone because Janssen was born too close to its sun and its fiery volcanic hellscape, right? And so that's just, you know, it's a fun interlude. The user can touch feet, you know, to ground, walk around and learn about this. And then Janssen is not built to last, right? it's going to eventually die. It's going to be consumed by its star. And so we take you off of Janssen and you witness it being consumed by its star, which is a real scientific model out of Caltech. Again, you know, all of this was based in real science. We then board the Chandra telescope,

which is used to study X-ray information and like catastrophic events in space like supernovas. And so on board the Chandra, you get to witness, you know, everyone's favorite star, Betelgeuse Supernova. And that's the cool scene because it's a multi-staged explosion. And the meaning of that scene, really, the point was not just to show an explosion, but to show that the life cycle, very much like we have life cycles on Earth here, when a star explodes, it spits off its elements, you know, its sulfur, its calcium, its potassium, everything that it's made of into the universe. And those are recycled to create new stars. It's all part of a circle of life that's happening on a universal macro level. So this is a very important message in Starstruck. And when a star dies, you know, there are several different branches that can happen to it. But one of the things that can happen is that it becomes a part of a black hole. And so from there, we take you to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which is named Sagittarius A star. And there we have our interstellar-esque

scene at a black hole where you not only get to see it from afar like Nolan shows you we take you right up to the event horizon and you get to have that interactive experience and after all that you know after we've gone thousands of light years away and we've learned a lot about birth life and death of stars we take you back to earth to the future of astronomy which is being built right now in the Atacama Desert and it's a it's a telescope called the Giant Magellan Telescope and it's scheduled to see its first light in 2030. And it's going to be, you know, the penultimate ground-based telescope. So that thing we saw in the beginning, the MMT at Whipple, this is like that on steroids. You know, and it's going to, it's massive and it's going to look at things like black holes and understand perhaps more of some of the mystery of what's going on in those event horizons, but also searching for exoplanets that maybe have life. It's a very exciting project, you know, And part of the mission of Starstruck is really to inspire anyone interested in STEM or science or, you know, anything in that realm.

Or maybe who's not interested, didn't know they're interested, but become interested. You know, they could be sitting at that telescope in the 2030s working on it if Starstruck inspires them. So that's one of our main goals with the experience. Nice, yeah. And I remember you saying either before or after I went into the experience, you said one of the biggest challenges was to try to not make it feel like a lecture. And I'm just curious to hear about that journey and trying to communicate a lot of science information without it feeling like too pedagogical or too didactic. Yeah, this was a difficult process. It was a tug of war. And again, Randall and Laura were just so great about understanding that we are trying to make an entertaining experience that's approachable for everybody. but it also has to adhere to the scientific rigor of the Smithsonian. None of them are going to put their name on something that is sci-fi. And so many times, you know, physically, visually, everything is accurate. You know, we either started with the point cloud data or we built on scientific modeling that Randall and Laura gave us.

That's all well and good. But in VR, you know, in pacing and storytelling, you need to get through scenes. You can't stop and linger and talk about protons and electrons for 15 minutes. You know, you need to get people through. So one of the big compromises we made was creating what we call AR overlays, which are really just inline text in the experience. And so Starstruck really has three tracks inside of it. If you know nothing about space, if you're 10 years old, you can enjoy Starstruck as just a visual buffet, you know, of sights and sounds and just having fun and touching buttons. If you're a PhD astrophysicist, you can go through and really read all of those pieces of information and do those interactive experience and really learn from it. And I've heard that from real astrophysicists. And so it's all baked in, but it's not baked in a way that's luxury. It's kind of like a choose-your-own-adventure within. You can decide how scientific you want to let it get to you.

Yeah, I guess one design provocation I'd push back on the piece was to think about if you could potentially do this piece without any text within it. Because there was a lot of text on almost every scene, and I found myself sitting there reading it, but then I would almost get lost in all the data in some ways, and I felt like I wish there was almost an option to turn it off, because I think I would have had a different experience if I was just taking it in without having a bunch of other metadata that was another track that was also kind of getting more into my head rather than in my body. So I'm not sure if you've thought about that or at least providing as an option to let the person decide whether or not. Because there are things that you can pick up, but I just felt like whenever I'm reading in VR, it sort of ticks me into more of a mental space rather than being embodied. So I'm not sure if you've considered how much text there is Because it is a lot of things that were kind of flipping me back into a mental space rather than an embodied space. It's a great point. It's something we discussed and continue to discuss.

And I agree with you. If you just wanted the sights, you know, the visual version, I think that this should be an option. And I'm going to bring that back to the team and talk to them about it. You know, originally it was a compromise made by the astrophysicists that we, to adhere to the scientific rigor, we're not going to make astro or narrators say all of these things, but we'll just put them in text form. But I agree with you, to be honest. I think that there should be an option for people. Perhaps, let's say we're in an art museum, not in a science museum, and the audience is really trying to just feel size and scale and beauty of space. Perhaps the diagram explaining the six different lives, the deaths of a star and the outcomes may not be interesting to them. So I'll run that up the flagpole, but I agree with your comment, and it was all just like there's so much going on here you know we did our best to try to reduce as much as we could believe me i you know we edited out as much as we could but i fully agree with you and it's a lot of information in space you know yeah because i think it i mean it's very

spatial you know because when i'm doing the different kind of elemental balances of what the different pieces are and i said spasilians like very much air first it's a lot of information and then the earth. It'd be nice if it was like earth and water or being able to see the spatial experience and then hear the stories in a way that could potentially be conveyed without reading a bunch of the information And I think that a bit of a like how you architect and design it Because you said you were trying to get away from having it feel like a lecture but having all the information there and reading it sort of naturally kind of inclines you being more like I'm on a school trip rather than being on a grand adventure into space in a way that makes me feel filled with awe and wonder about the mysteries and majesty of space. you actually do have these interactive moments where you can go and push a button and see a photo. And so you can almost think about like go over here if you want to interact and like see more photos. And maybe over here there's like the information, but coordinate it off into like one corner. Or like the people who want to go over there can do that, but have like clear quadrants or options for people to look at the images or here's a little interactive part.

Because there are different moments where you can interact with objects in a way that isn't just a completely passive experience, but you have buttons and other things. And so maybe just talk about some of the other ways that you wanted to make it more interactive. Yeah, interactivity is, you know, it's a new thing in LBE VR. It presents some operational complications. It can sometimes. We wanted to include it. We didn't want to make it necessary for the story to keep flowing. And so I don't want to say that we did it in a gimmicky way because we didn't, but it's not meant to be like what we didn't want to happen is that you need to push a button to open a door to go to the next chapter. And then people get hung up and they get stuck in a traffic jam or anything like this. It's there if you want to do it. It's much like the AR overlays, like they're there if you want to read them. And if you don't, it's okay. We have some meaningful interactivity, like I was explaining at the black hole scene, where we're taking a real scientific experiment of bending light and we're visualizing it. And that, to me, is really meaningful. In the galaxy room, we don't have a big enough venue to let you touch all the galaxies in the deep field image.

So we let you use a laser to touch them. There's other ones that are fun. You know, like when you're on the Hubble telescope, we actually had the option of putting a big screen up showing its top ten discoveries, and we found that distracting. And it was just taking up half of the field of view. And so we just said, you know, let's do a carousel button and let people play if they want to. They can play with us. And so, you know, we use interactivity lightly, sometimes meaningfully, sometimes for fun. And it was sort of our first foray into interactivity. And we're going to continue on our future experiences to play with that. It's a touchy thing, you know, how you use interactivity. So anyway, I like what we have. You can pick up diamonds on Janssen, for example, but we don't call that out because we don't want people stumbling around on the floor. Or, you know, the HTC hand tracking is what it is, right? It's not perfect. And so, you know, you have to do things like pinch your fingers and your thumbs to get the right tracking.

It is what it is. We are where we are with the technology. So if you know VR well, you can go ahead and do that and throw the diamonds into the lava. If you don't, it doesn't interrupt the story whatsoever. So we kind of put it in like Easter eggs. Yeah, it's interesting the way that you can benefit from being a bystander to someone else's agency that is clicking the buttons, you can kind of stand behind and then also watch the slideshow, which is also kind of nice. No, no, that's huge, actually. It's great that you noticed that because sharing interactivity is complex in LBE VR with groups. It's easy to do a single-person interactivity. It's harder for your partner to be able to see what you're doing. And I actually really wanted that, and Tomas stepped up and delivered it. It was a stretch goal, you know, for the group to be able to share that cycling through telescope greatest discoveries or see you pick up diamonds and throw them and you know we did it i think that is fun you know it makes the whole point of doing the lbevr thing is you're doing it as a group you're getting lost in a faraway place and having fun and learning and so watching your

companions do anything is interesting but you know interactivity is limited with the current tech and it creates operational issues you just have to be careful with it you don't want to make it too much of a gimmick that interrupts the main thing which you're trying to do is teach educate and tell a story you know so it's a fine line but i i think we did a good job on our first foray into interactivity with this one yeah one of the other things i was going to say is that i was really impressed by you know the limited amount of physical space that you have but yet when you're in vr you really feel like you're being taken on a vast journey because you're you're actually kind of moving around quite a bit but also it's like the boundless space so you kind of feel like you're walking in these infinite spaces but i felt like the pathing the guiding to where to go was really elegant and nice in the sense that if you're outside of where you're supposed to be it'll like turn into the matrix and tell you to go over here and then it'll basically turn back the experience but you had like different layers of like here is a general

space you need to be but we need to maybe go over to this like little square and so there's just like ways that you were using signs and symbols on the ground to kind of give some indication where you could be. Like, here's a safe space where you can be, but here, ultimately, we're going to be going over here. And so I felt like it allowed me to move around quite a bit. And, you know, there's a number of people that are in there at the same time. And so I saw them come through without their nameplates as I was watching it. But overall, it just gave me the sense of going on a really grand adventure in a way that my body was moving quite a lot through the space, which I think actually helps take in a lot of information through this sense of, like, embodied cognition of walking through these different spaces to take in all these different little story vignettes. Yeah, so thank you for noticing that. I mean, we put a lot of time into what we call the space platform. We had done a previous experience with Machu Picchu, and we spent a lot of time saying, follow the yellow lines to the blue box. And we found that to be incredibly annoying and taking away from the story. And so we wanted to design something more elegant that's more intuitive,

that's just sort of a subtly lit path kind of pulling you to where you want to go. and if you step out of bounds, it'll show you more firmly, you know, like you get back onto the path. But we don't want to be just screaming that in your ear. We want to just more organically pull you there, and that's what the space platform is designed to do. If you're in the sweet spot where you're supposed to be, you know, that's ideal. But if you're adventurous and want to go off to the edges of the platform and look off the back, we put content there for you, you know. That's where a lot of those AR overlays sit, where some of the secondary telescopes like Voyager 1 sit. And so we put a lot of time into the mechanics and the locomotion. So thanks for noticing that. You know, it's like permaculture circles where you have different places where you are in the center and have other areas around it. But it basically created a tiered system where you're basically out of bounds. You're sort of in a moderately safe zone and then a totally safe zone. So it gave an ability to kind of wander where you kind of had some freedom to move around more so than I've seen in most other experiences that have much more tightly bound chaperone system where you can't go beyond a certain threshold or otherwise you blip out.

But this was kind of a nice intermediary where it allowed you to kind of roam around and know where you could go. But I feel like you could actually kind of have the freedom to move around, which most pieces you feel a lot more constrained. Yeah, I mean, thanks again for noticing all this. It was like we put a lot of work into it. And what you experienced here is our venues are typically four or five times the size of this. So we have a snaking path in our normal venues where you would never intersect with another group. And you'd really feel free to play more and to explore more and really push the edges of each space platform and every boundary. For example, on Jansen, you can really wander off to the edge of where the lava is on the exoplanet. You know, we're here at the Venice Film Festival and we're in a tight space. and for you to still have those comments is meaningful, so thank you. But if you go see it at London Science Museum or anywhere else, you're going to have even more freedom to go explore and have your own adventure, which is the goal. How many people can you put through this experience per hour? So it's really unlimited technically. It's more of a physical space constraint.

Right now we're launching groups every three minutes, probably 100 to 120 people an hour, depending on the venue size. But given a bigger venue, we could push more through. Nice. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of immersive storytelling in this type of location-based entertainment adventures might be and what they might be able to enable? So I think the goal of the Smithsonian is to disseminate science and education and art and all things. And I think our medium of immersive media really embodies that. And certain subject matters like space are perfectly told in immersive media. And so my hope is that we can keep working with the Smithsonian and telling these types of stories. Personally, that's my personal goal. For the medium, you know, we're all frustrated with the form factors of the headsets. You know, we hope that they shrink. You know, the resolutions continue to improve. The compute power continues to improve.

That's just going to allow us to tell richer, deeper stories with more characters. You know, the player systems, I think this is more in our own hands. We're going to continue to evolve our player system to allow for bigger groups, more groups, more throughput, and easier install, which means wider distribution. We're going to continue to work at that at Fever, certainly. But yeah, I just hope that creators like myself keep picking subject matters that really lend themselves to immersive media, because not all do. Some stories are told just fine in 2D mediums, But there's many, many stories out there where I think standing inside of a place, you know, it's just perfect for immersive media. So I hope all the creators here at Venice just pick those stories and tell them and really pull people into our medium because it's quite beautiful when it's done well. Awesome. Is there anything else that's left in said that you'd like to say of the broader immersive community? Man, I'm just so, you know, I'm really honored to be here. Honestly, like working with the Smithsonian was a dream come true.

As I said, growing up in D.C., it's such an honor to be affiliated with that brand. And the whole team, by the way, I want to shout out Denise Elliott and Nikki Marco and Elizabeth Bacos. They were just amazing. And so working with them was like a dream come true. Working with Randall and Laura was a dream come true. But then the cherry on top was getting selected to be here at Venice amongst my peers. This has just been an awesome festival. It's my first time here at the festival. And, yeah, I just wanted to thank Liz and Michelle for having us and all the other creators. It's been so cool to see all their works. And, yeah, I hope to come back every year either as a participant or as a guest and spend more time here. Awesome. Well, really enjoyed seeing what you're doing there. What now is a Fever. Do you still identify as working for Fever or what do you say that you work at? Yeah, yeah. My company's name is Virtual Worlds. Tomas' company's name is Overhead 4D. but I very much work at Fever and I'm proud to be a part of that team. Nice. Yeah, so it's really great to see what Fever is doing here in the LBE space

and with the Smithsonian Star Trek and, yeah, just to see the types of LBE adventures that are starting to be created and, yeah, all the different things that I've seen from other things like Xcurio and other best practices from, like, the Infinite that are allowing you to kind of navigate these different spaces. And I'm sure that it will become more interactive and more open world stuff at some point, But I think right now it's got a really good model that seems to be really effective at allowing people to move their body through space to be able to kind of take in these really epic stories. So thanks so much for joining here on the podcast to help make it all down. Thanks for having me and thank you for the work that you do. It's really important and we all appreciate it. Awesome. Thanks. Thanks so much for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And I just want to say that I'm really trying to live into the transformation economy, meaning I want to give away all this information for free. make it publicly accessible for not only you, but the entire community. And if you find value in that, then please do consider supporting me on Patreon. You know, I'm on this journey of trying

to reach my 1000 true fans. And if I have just $5 a month from that 1000, I'll be in a much more solid and stable financial position. So really need your help to be able to get to that point. So if you enjoy what I'm doing here at the Voices of VR podcast, then please do consider supporting me at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening. Thank you.