Your attention, please. This is the tracking procedure of an adventure through virtual reality. Adventurous men of documentation who have made this journey before you are carefully plotting every phase of this incredible journey as, from the comfort of your own home, you shrink beyond the smallness of an atom: the smallest building block of matter. We wish you an enlightening experience. For though your body will shrink, your mind will expand.
Shrinking to the Size of an Atom
Update: The app has been added to Oculus’ App Lab, so installation no longer requires extra steps. Just click the link at the end of the article, hit the “free” button and it’ll be available on your headset with no fuss.
Jeremy Marx (Disney History Institute) and Kurt Pfeifer (Cranky Something Studios) created an amazing piece of documentation on a classic but dearly departed Disneyland attraction In 2018, Adventure Through Inner Space. Through the magic of Virtual Reality, you can ride the attraction again from the comfort of your couch. It’s a faithful recreation of the real thing, right down to the individual movements of the Omnimover cars. But where this recreation shines is through its usage of visual targeting to create an impeccable level of immersion. This might not be entirely new since this release is an update to that 2018 version, but it was new to me, and likely many of you as well!
This isn’t just a pre-rendered video of the classic attraction. Instead, it puts you in the Atommobile with a full six degrees of freedom in virtual reality. Meaning you can move forward, back, and side to side in the scene instead of being fixed in place. This enables you to physically peek around the car and shuffle across the seat.
We tried this on an Oculus Quest and the difference between this and a static 360° video is striking. The image is extremely clear because it’s being rendered right on your device without the compression you’d typically find on a YouTube video. The high framerate makes everything appear smooth and realistic. Throwing in the six degrees of freedom makes it feel like you’re actually moving about the Atommobile. It’s quite surreal, really. Perhaps as surreal as the attraction itself. With that said, this attraction was well before my time, so I didn’t get to experience it firsthand. For the moment, this is the closest approximation I can get until time-travel is invented.
Take an Adventure Through Inner Space
If you’re feeling the itch to expand your mind, the development team has made this experience available in two ways: PC and Oculus Quest. For PC, you can run it like an app on the monitor or attach a VR headset. For Oculus Quest, you’ll either need to sideload it (here’s a guide on how to do that) or run it on a PC through Oculus Link.
We highly recommend you remain seated with your hands and arms inside the Atommobile for the duration of the experience because otherwise, you’re going to fall over. That’s likely an inherent issue with VR; as the Omnimover cars turn, there’s potential for disorientation. Just something to be aware of if you’re going to give this a try.
Installation Links:
Now if only we can get Marx to flesh out a walking VR tour of Ken Anderson’s Haunted House that he showed us at D23 last summer…
Make Future Magic
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Let’s Hear From You
Like I mentioned before, the actual Adventure Through Inner Space attraction, which opened in 1967 and closed in 1985, came and went well before I was old enough to take a spin on an Atommobile. Is this an attraction you miss, or do you wish you’d have had a chance to experience it? Do you think Virtual Reality is a good way of recreating a theme park experence for defunct attractions? There are plenty of other fantastic fan-made VR attraction recreations, have you found a favorite one? Let us know in the comments below.