In the early days of modern consumer VR — all the way back in 2013 — a developer identifying himself publicly only as Steve D. and operating the company DrashVR created a way to understand the scale of the universe that’s fundamentally impossible with any other medium.
Dozens of artists who persist today in their ongoing discovery of Good VR credit their early experience in Titans of Space with inspiring them to pursue all manner of spatial design. The Iranian developer Sahand Malaei, one of the creators of Banners & Bastions, recently described the work during a Good VR podcast episode.
“I remember there was this moment where I was flying close to the sun and I remember like just seeing how massive it was and how small I was and just knowing that this was an experience that could only happen in VR,” Malaei said. “I actually cried.”
So say we all. The work is proof not just that the space for discovery in VR is much larger than the focus of gaming by Oculus, but that our understanding of reality itself is constrained by the mediums of the past.
Every classroom in the world would be better with a VR headset in the room locked to the opening scene of Titans of Space and its representation of the Earth, moon and sun at one-millionth their actual scale. You can spend 20 seconds grounded in a virtual spaceship and understand not just how small the moon is in comparison to the Earth, but simply turn your head to look at the sun in three dimensions and you’ll immediately understand how incredibly large the sun is burning in our sky.
The world should be filled with more scientists, astronomers, and explorers unconstrained by the inanity of modern life fed to them by screens, books, and social feeds, and all they need to see the enormous potential floating just out of sight above their heads is to experience DrashVR’s use of scale conveyed by three dimensions.
Titans of Space remains a timeless example of the enduring power of VR to expand the human mind. Though Valve, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Pico, and Google rushed across different periods to apply their business development to wide field of view optics in VR, most of them racing to the bottom in their own way in an attempt to establish themselves as the ground floor of everything you see and hear, Titans of Space exists as proof that you will never need a platform to stand on to have a good VR experience except one made by a single person inspired by an idea they’ve learned to express with a head-tracked 3D display.
Titans of Space remains one of the best VR experiences ever made and is one of the first to be formally certified with a Good Virtual Reality badge.
Yep... conveying scale is one of VR's superpowers!