OTOY, Paramount Game Studios and Roddenberry Entertainment follow up with Roddenberry Archive experience produced at the highest levels of fidelity and historical accuracy for the Apple Vision Pro
LOS ANGELES, CA – Feb. 2, 2024
In partnership with Paramount Game Studios and The Gene Roddenberry Estate, OTOY is thrilled to unveil the ‘The Archive,’ exclusively for Apple Vision Pro. ‘The Archive’ launches on the App Store today in tandem with the release of Apple’s new spatial computing platform. The app marks a major evolution of the Roddenberry Archive project, which had over 4-million visitors during a limited 3-week preview on the web in April 2023.
The new Archive app immerses fans in nearly two-hours of groundbreaking Star Trek spatial experiences built exclusively for Apple Vision Pro, allowing them to explore hundreds of fully realized locations, artifacts and unique items – spanning every Star Trek TV show and film across the franchise’s nearly 60-year history. With only gaze and touch, Apple Vision Pro users can transport themselves instantly through gorgeous immersive 3D environments traversing between different eras of Star Trek from The Cage pilot to Star Trek: Lower Decks.
They can inspect each item on Captain Kirk’s shelf, take a seat at Quark’s bar on the Deep Space Nine Promenade, or launch a shuttle from the U.S.S. Enterprise-D’s hangar bay. With Apple SharePlay, a visit through the world of Star Trek can also become a shared social experience that can be live streamed with friends and family over FaceTime.
Created exclusively for the Vision Pro app, a select number of Star Trek assets are available as downloadable holographic objects which can be placed in the user’s home environment. These models and sets can be shrunk or expanded from life size to dollhouse scales while rendering at a fidelity and quiescence never before possible on consumer hardware.
Audiences can play with the size and scale of the legendary U.S.S. Enterprise – enabling them to experience what it is like to walk around the original 11-foot physical U.S.S. Enterprise model on display at the Smithsonian, or have the in-universe 1:1 life size 1000-foot ship fly overhead.
OTOY concept videos and documentary films from recent Roddenberry Archive releases have been remastered specifically for Apple Vision Pro and are featured in the app along with newly restored footage from the Roddenberry Archive – including previews of the unabridged interviews with George Lucas and Stan Lee exploring Gene Roddenberry’s influence on Star Wars and Marvel.
The Archive features three new documentary featurettes including an interview with Walter Koenig, who played Ensign Pavel Chekov in Star Trek: The Original Series and a two-part interview with David Gerrold, discussing his involvement writing for Star Trek across many different eras and series.
Samples of OTOY’s many years of collaboration with legendary creators are also included in the archive, including content done by OTOY in collaboration with Bruce Timm in 2014 for Batman: The Animated Series.
The app’s spatial content and streams were created by artists and studios using the Render Network and OTOY’s cutting-edge GPU rendering tools, bringing the highest levels of unbiased path-traced realism at unprecedented resolutions, powered by thousands of decentralized GPUs in the cloud. The app allows artists using OTOY’s tools to load their own immersive media creations on Apple Vision Pro and share it with others.
Featured in The Archive’s native spatial content for Apple Vision Pro are 1-meter by 1-meter light field cubes that are displayed at 90-frames-per-second in 4K resolution per eye, pushing the boundary on visual fidelity. Unbiased rendering and light field baking enable audiences to experience Star Trek worlds with fully path traced real time lighting, including dynamic glossy reflections and shadows, bringing revolutionary levels of photorealism to immersive content.
The Archive was developed using the Universal Scene Description (USD) format as part of OTOY’s membership in The Alliance for OpenUSD – a group formed by Pixar and Apple, among others – that is working to standardize the USD format across the industry to help artists and developers create and deploy complex real-time 3D experiences at scale.
“Through our multi-decade collaboration with OTOY, we have been working to push the frontiers of immersive technology to fulfill my father’s legacy, creative intent, and ideas in ways that can be experienced today and by generations yet to come.” said Rod Roddenberry, President of Roddenberry Entertainment. “The Roddenberry Archive, as an immersive experience on the Apple Vision Pro, is a remarkable milestone in realizing my father’s vision for the Holodeck. This release also fulfills one of my mother’s greatest wishes. She recorded her phenoms in 2008 before her passing, to have her voice live on in posterity. It is deeply moving for me to be able to have her voice now narrate portions of the archive” added Roddenberry. “I am also pleased that the archive can bring to life both published and unrealized influential narrative works from Star Trek’s rich literary history, covering my father’s one and only Star Trek novel for the Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979 through the decades of books and comics that subsequently followed.”
“Today’s release of the Archive app for Apple Vision Pro marks a major step towards realizing Gene Roddenberry’s Holodeck” said CEO of OTOY, Jules Urbach. “Through Apple’s breakthrough Vision Pro spatial computing platform, we can bring audiences back in time as if they were there on set during the making of Star Trek for the first time, with full visual immersion and historical accuracy” added Urbach.
The Archive’s latest release of navigable spatial content can be viewed as a live 2D stream on the web at https://roddenberry.x.io. For a limited time, the complete experience is available for free on both the web and Apple Vision Pro. Later this year, OTOY and Paramount will offer users unlimited viewing time and a-la-carte access to all current and future immersive Star Trek 3D experiences released through The Archive.
About OTOY Inc.
OTOY Inc. is the definitive cloud graphics company, pioneering technology that is redefining content creation and delivery for media and entertainment organizations around the world. OTOY’s Academy Award®-winning technology is used by leading visual effects studios, artists, animators, designers, architects, and engineers, providing unprecedented creative freedom, new levels of realism, and new economics in content creation and distribution powered by the cloud. For more information, visit www.otoy.com.
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About Paramount Consumer Products
Paramount Consumer Products oversees all licensing and merchandising for Paramount (Nasdaq: PARA, PARAA), a leading global media and entertainment company that creates premium content and experiences for audiences worldwide. Driven by iconic consumer brands, Paramount Consumer Products’ portfolio includes a diverse slate of brands and content from BET, CBS (including CBS Television Studios and CBS Television Distribution), Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount Pictures and SHOWTIME®. With properties spanning animation, live-action, preschool, youth and adult, Paramount Consumer Products is committed to creating the highest quality product for some of the world’s most beloved, iconic franchises. To view our range of consumer products and Paramount branded apparel, visit ParamountShop.com.