If you’ve read Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, the hit novel (and soon to be Spielberg movie) that takes place largely inside virtual reality, you’re probably eager to experience some of the story in VR. And thanks to companies like HTC Vive and TheWaveVR, you can now do that.
For Adam Arrigo, the CEO of TheWaveVR, which builds music VR experiences, getting the commission just a few months ago to build a VR version of The Distracted Globe zero-gravity dance club from the movie, was the job of a lifetime.
After Arrigo and his team built the project in record time–just a couple months of work—he tells me that they were faced with the nail-biting experience of showing it to Spielberg for a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Given that what they’d created was a social in-world experience, they decided to do the meeting in the VR dance club itself. A time was set, and on the day, Arrigo showed up–and waited.
He waited some more. No Spielberg. No Spielberg. He remembers that he was nervous because, although he’s not generally impressed by celebrities, this was Steven fricking Spielberg.
At some point, he says got distracted by something for a few minutes, and when he went back to the meeting point, he got a phone call from someone associated with the famed director. Spielberg was there, Arrigo was told. But where was he? He wasn’t down on the floor.
Actually, Spielberg had shown up and immediately understood the user interface, which allows flying, and he was all over that, soaring around way overhead in his cat avatar, having a grand old time.
And that’s how Arrigo met Steven Spielberg. Who, by the way, gave a green light to the project.
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