Titanic: VR experience shows the sinking from a passenger's perspective
The new "Lifeboat Experience" for Meta Quest reconstructs the sinking of the Titanic from the perspective of a surviving passenger.
Condemned to watch.
(Image: Engage XR)
The boat deck is crowded with 1st class passengers. It's 1:10 a.m. and the evacuation is going slowly. A crew member reassures an anxious passenger by saying that it's just a drill. But the tension is palpable.
Dramatic scenes play out right in front of you: A family is separated as they board the lifeboats. Only women and children are allowed on board, says an officer. The father and 16-year-old son have to stay behind while the daughter is lifted into lifeboat 6, crying.
(Image:Â Engage XR)
A few moments later, you are sitting with those who are the first to be lowered into the water. The seriousness of the situation is not clear to many: some passengers complain that they were taken out of bed in the middle of the night, others jokingly talk about an "adventure". As the boat is lowered, the size of the ship becomes apparent – and the panic on the lower decks.
As the lifeboat slowly pulls away from the Titanic, the ship is already listing. "That's impossible," says a woman. "The Titanic is unsinkable." A few minutes later, the unthinkable happens. Margaret Brown, who was sitting right next to you and would go down in history as "the unsinkable one", asked the helmsman Robert Hichens to row back and pick up drowning people. But he refuses, as has been widely reported.
Explore the wreck of the Titanic with VR goggles
The 15-minute VR experience is based on eyewitness accounts and historical research. The studio took liberties with the timing: in reality, the events depicted lasted around 70 minutes. You can move freely in the simulation, but there are no real interactions. The VR experience is a historical drama, not a survival simulation. However, this does not detract from the immersive nature of the VR experience, on the contrary. It makes the powerlessness of the passengers all the more palpable.
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The "Lifeboat Experience" is part of the more extensive VR game "Titanic VR", in which you take on the role of a deep-sea explorer and submarine pilot to explore the wreck of the Titanic, photograph it and recover items from it. In addition to this narrative campaign, the game includes guided wreck tours and the opportunity to visit a virtual memorial with remains of the Titanic submarine near the Titanic.
Titanic VR: relaunched for Meta Quest
Titanic VR was first released in 2018 for PC VR goggles and has since been largely forgotten. With the release for Meta Quest 3 and 3S in April, it was made accessible to a new generation and a wider audience.
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The Lifeboat Experience was released this week after a delay of several months because the developers first had to optimize it for the standalone headsets. Older Quest devices are not supported by Titanic VR: They cannot smoothly display the graphically demanding scenes with their numerous human figures and dynamic light and shadow effects. The same applies to the virtual diving trips to the wreck.
Titanic VR was developed by the studio Immersive VR Education, which aims to bring history to life with virtual reality and has created two other VR experiences worth seeing with "Apollo 11" and "1943: Berlin Blitz". The studio has been operating under a new name since 2021 and runs the VR learning platform Engage.
(kbe)
