BBC Home: A VR Spacewalk

CASE STUDY

BBC Home is a multi-award-winning VR experience, that puts audiences at the center of the story.

Enhancing Interest in Space

Home’s ambition as a piece of space VR is to combine a strong narrative and sense of drama with the incredible impact possible in an immersive experience, in order to encourage and enhance the public’s interest in space.

The interactive VR experience sees you traversing the International Space Station (ISS), journeying on the Canadarm, and jetpacking back to safety.

It puts you at the center of the story, taking you on an emotional and personal journey while delivering beautiful, heart-stopping, and memorable moments.

Magnopus (REWIND) collaborated with the BBC to create this epic 15-minute immersive virtual reality experience.

Pushing the Boundaries of Immersive Experiences

Home maintains the BBC’s long history of innovation in how it informs, educates and entertains. VR at the BBC is about exploration and understanding the new medium and its audience. Home has led the way, both inside and out of the BBC, in exploring not just the technology, but the emerging language of storytelling in the medium.

The experience is developed in Unreal Engine 4 to push for the highest possible visual fidelity and is accompanied with treated, spatial audio. The team worked with script writer Marco Crivellari to develop the narrative and consulted with ESA experts and astronauts. The experience encompasses randomised views of the earth and atmospheric phenomenon. The ISS was constructed using a Haynes Manual—the most detailed and accurate plan you can find—and built to real-world scale.

Bluetooth heart rate monitors feed back into the experience, recreating the sound of your own heartbeat. This is combined with an integrated live mic for the user that is acoustically treated and delivered back into the experience. The ambient sound is spatial and creates the claustrophobia of the astronaut’s helmet and the unnerving sounds of your own body and your space suit’s life support system. A gaming chair is also used to provide haptic feedback. Finally, for selected live viewings, a live voice actor is incorporated, who is able to ad-lib on the script, conversing with the player and observing and responding to their predicament.

Home is available to download from Steam for HTC Vive and Oculus Stores for Oculus Rift.