What It's Like to Go Inside the World 'Divergent' Via Virtual Reality

Last Thursday night, I stepped into a trailer on a New York side street, where I was ushered to a chair under a heat lamp, had a heavy pair of goggles strapped to my face and noise-canceling headphones secured over my head. The next thing I knew, I had a stern-looking Kate Winslet challenging my place in the Dauntless faction.

Insurgent: Shatter Reality is a four-minute virtual reality experience co-produced by Lionsgate, the distributor of the Divergent series, and Samsung, which provided the hardware. Samsung wants its Gear VR headset and Milk VR platform to be the leaders in the burgeoning new virtual reality industry, which surrounds users in a 360-degree environment and allows them to explore it to various degrees.

Imagine watching a movie, but instead of being limited by the camera’s field of vision, you can look all around to see different parts of the environment and perhaps even notice elements of a story happening that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Virtual reality could be a game-changer, which makes it a hot industry; a lot of money has already invested in it, including the $2 billion that Facebook spent on Oculus Rift last summer.

For Shatter Reality, the Divergent team created 3D models, texture files and 3D scans of several sets and actors including Winslet, Miles Teller, and Mekhi Phifer, which help immerse you in a world that you’ve only seen on the 2D big screen. There were three different “scenes” in the short program, which are exclusive to the hardware and will not appear in the upcoming movie. You start out face-to-face with the sneering Winslet, who has her doubts that you belong in the brave Dauntless faction. As such, she puts you through two different “fear landscapes”: Hanging off the edge of a crumbling building in future dystopian Chicago and sitting on train tracks as a locomotive comes chugging your way.

The video graphics were very similar to those you’d see in a decent mobile device game or on a Nintendo 3Ds. This was to be expected, because the Samsung Gear VR is more of a consumer-grade product, run on a Samsung Galaxy Note 4 smartphone. The visuals would be less important if there was more interaction to be had with the experience, which is quite passive. The ability to look around you is pretty cool, but in this case, it’s sort of like swiveling your head while being tied to a chair; in both fear landscapes, there’s nothing you can do but plummet and let yourself get drilled by the oncoming train.

In the Divergent story, people are supposed to sit idly by as their fears rush toward them, but it doesn’t mean it’s a good cinematic experience. Video games have become so graphically advanced and responsive to our body’s motions (think the XBox Kinect and Wii) that during these scenes of Shatter Reality, we can’t help but try to dodge the threats.

The lack of responsiveness when in film-viewing mode is a bummer, and so the VR technology seems like a much more natural fit with gaming, which allows interaction. It would be amazing to get fully immersed in the storming of the beaches in Saving Private Ryan or be dropped into the thick of the fighting in a film like The Raid, but it’d be hard not to want to take a step further at that point and somehow participate.

At the moment, the best bet is for VR to immerse viewers in lush landscapes that you might see in an IMAX nature documentary. It’d also be great for virtual tours of cities and other attractions where looking around is the most desirable interaction. Ultimately, for VR to become part of mainstream cinema, filmmakers will have to entirely rethink the linear structure and pacing of their movies; I can imagine watching Star Wars via virtual reality, and wanting to pause before we got to the second act because I’m having too much fun hanging out in the Mos Eisley Cantina.

All of this may come sooner rather than later: The device-maker HTC just announced that it was coming out with a new VR in collaboration with the gaming company Valve, Google is pressing forward with a simplistic Google Cardboard apparatus, and in January there was an impressive array of virtual reality filmmaking at the Sundance Film Festival’s forward-looking Next section. The Insurgent: Shatter Reality experience is just the very beginning of this technology, and knowing that was the most exciting thing about it.