The BBC debuted their latest VR experience, Doctor Who: The Runaway, at Tribeca Film Festival last week. Now, the company’s VR division says the 12-minute animated experience, which is voiced by the original actors, is slated to land on PC VR and Oculus mobile headsets soon.
Update (May 2nd, 2019): The BBC says that Doctor Who: The Runaway is slated to arrive ‘soon’ on Oculus Rift and HTC Vive as a real-time rendered experience. A 360 version will also be made available on Oculus Go and Samsung Gear VR.
There’s no firm launch date yet, but we’ll keep you posted once the BBC releases word.
Update (April 15th, 2019): The BBC have released a new trailer for Doctor Who: The Runaway which gives us a great first peek at the look an feel of the upcoming experience (see embedded video above). It looks to be a polished experience and that intriguing art style looks great in motion. We’ve also got more information on what the experience involves – courtesy of the latest press release:
“You’ve been in a collision. You wake inside the TARDIS. The Doctor introduces you to the person, or thing, you collided with. He’s a strange and magnificent ball of living energy called Volta. Part surly teenager, part bomb, Volta is very unstable. In fact, he’s primed to explode. Big time. Unless he can be returned to his home planet, sharpish. The problem is, a squad of galactic busybodies has other plans for Volta. Bad ones. Drawn into a frantic chase, you become the Doctor’s unlikely assistant as she races against time to get Volta home to his parents. Armed with a sonic screwdriver, it is down to you to help the Doctor as she faces the forces of evil, and teenage angst, in this animated 13-minute VR adventure from the team behind Doctor Who Series 11.”
The full experience is to receive its inaugural showing at next week’s Tribeca Film Festival, taking place in New York from Friday April 26th.
The original article covering the announcement continues below.
Dubbed Doctor Who: The Runaway, fans will get a chance to step into the TARDIS and join the Thirteenth Doctor (played by Jodie Whittaker) in virtual reality.
According to a press release, the experience is said to last 12 minutes, and will be available on “selected VR headsets in the coming months.” Just which headsets the experience will launch on is still unclear (see update).
The animated VR experience was created by the BBC and Passion Animation Studios, with Whittaker reprising her role as ‘The Doctor’.
Passion Animation was most notably behind the Gorillaz VR music video ‘Saturn Barnz (Spirit House)’ and the 2D theatrical cut of Google Spotlight Stories’ award-winning VR short Pearl.
“Our team at the BBC VR Hub has been creating new experiences with the goal of helping to usher virtual reality into the mainstream, and Doctor Who is exactly the sort of series that can help more people to try this new technology,” says Zillah Watson, head of BBC VR Hub. “The show has been pushing boundaries for over 55 years, and VR enables Doctor Who to explore a whole new dimension of storytelling.”
Doctor Who: The Runaway is said to include new original music from composer Segun Akinola, the mind behind much of music featured in the show’s eleventh season. The 12-minute experience was written by Victoria Asare-Archer and directed by Mathias Chelebourg, whose previous VR films include Alice, the Virtual Reality Play, and The Real Thing VR.