Facebook's Oculus Funded VR Movie 'Space Explorers' Lets You Experience Astronaut Training

An astronaut’s journey into space is one of the toughest jobs ever. The physical and mental effort it takes to be confined in a metal tube that hurtles through often unexplored space is arduous to say the least. But, never has a journey set the chemical trails of imagination in your brain alight with sheer excitement like the one where you can turn back to see your home planet. To experience the marvel of endless space and see the shiny specks of light in the sky we call stars from out of Earth's atmosphere has held our fascination for long.

Every space mission is celebrated as a milestone in human progress because it takes extreme engineering and minds with the best understanding of the physical world on earth and beyond. A Virtual Reality (VR) film called “Space Explorers” promises you a cutting-edge and virtual first-hand experience of what it takes to be an astronaut.

The movie is being developed by Felix and Paul Studios — with help from Morgan Spurlock’s Warrior Poets — and was funded by Facebook-owned Oculus according to a Fast Company report. This announcement was made at Facebook's Oculus Connect 4 conference held Wednesday, to announce the new stand-alone VR headset called “Oculus Go.”

The 30-minute film aims at giving viewers a VR experience where they will be shot into the world of trainee astronauts striving to reach space. The filmmakers worked with NASA, SpaceX, and the Russian space program in an effort to give us the most comprehensive virtual space experience yet, said the Fast Company report.

The finished project is set to be debuted at next year’s Sundance Film Festival. A three-minute trailer of the movie was shown Wednesday by Felix and Paul Studios on Samsung’s Gear VR. To make this concept a reality, Felix and Paul worked in close quarters with a team of astronauts to understand the world behind the people who aim to leave this planet. "At first all the doors are closed," Fast Company quoted Felix and Paul co-founder and creative director Paul Raphael as saying while talking about the project’s early stages from over a year ago. "Then they’re opening some pretty amazing doors"

The team plans on making a second film that will be shot by astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS), if the first one is a success.

"Space Explorers" shows us a comprehensive view of astronaut training. It follows a group of young astronauts undergoing training for the next Mars mission. All the steps from NASA’s Johnson Space Center, the incredible Neutral Buoyancy Lab and New Mexico’s White Sands, where Mars rovers prowl endless desert are included in the movie. Users experience spacesuit training and also watch astronauts perform the various spacewalks that will be used on Mars. The movie offers the full experience of undergoing training for a mission in space, the report said.

The movie comes at a time when Facebook is looking to revitalize the Oculus devices. The company is looking to make VR devices more important in everyday entertainment. According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the future lies in VR and this attempt at a stand-alone VR headset that does not require a computer or a phone is seen by him as a move to expand the reach of VR headsets. Currently, the roadblock to the growth of VR technology is the fact that an approximately $100 device performs only one function that is still not an essential aspect of entertainment, Gartner analyst Brian Blau said in a KLFY News 10 report.