A new virtual reality project allows users to explore an expanded replica of the Bat Cave as it appeared in the early 1990s Batman animated series you probably grew up watching.
“You’re going to be able to see [the bat cave] in angles that were never imagined or shown in the original series,” Jules Urbach, CEO and co-founder of OTOY, a cloud rendering company, told us when we caught up with him at The WorldPost Future of Work conference in London.
“The cave we built… is hundreds of meters in each direction, so it’s just this enormous volume, and you’ll be able to have a story told in that environment.”
The project, yet unnamed, is produced in partnership with Warner Brothers, which helped bring along the original designer, voice actors, and script writers to make the experience as authentic as possible.
“From the very first thing you see — and I’m not going to reveal what that is — it should make you feel like you are watching that cartoon back in your living room, back in 1992, except there is no living room,” Urbach said.
The project is slated to be released sometime soon, possibly later this month.
It will be made available on the Samsung Galaxy Gear VR, and soon after on Oculus Rift and other virtual reality platforms. Updates will come later down the road, as cell phones are better able to track your head movements, Urbach said.
“I think in the end when fans of the original series see this, they’re gonna be blown away by how close it looks,” he said. “In some cases we recreated things so closely that you can’t tell if you’re looking at a still image of what we’re rendering in [virtual reality].”
We tried it, and we can’t say too much, but we will say this: this is Gotham as you have never seen it before.
Produced in collaboration with The WorldPost.