This new Star Wars Virtual Reality experiment looks beautiful and insane

Around June of last year, Lucasfilm and its usual cohorts — Industrial Light and Magic, Skywalker Sound — announced that they were banding together to form the ILM Experience Lab, or ILMxLab. The new team would focus largely on figuring out how to translate the Star Wars universe into something magical in virtual reality.

The team’s latest project, Trials on Tatooine, a VR experiment (read: probably pretty short) that taps the wonderfully capable HTC Vive headset, looks…. friggin’… amazing.

We got our first glimpse of ILMxLab’s efforts back in December, with the release of Jakku Spy for Google Cardboard. Alas, Google Cardboard doesn’t have much in terms of input, so Jakku Spy was mostly a sit-back-and-watch experience.

This one, on the other hand, is built for the HTC Vive… and that means they get to bring the Vive’s super accurate, full-motion-tracking handheld controllers into the mix. And that, of course, means lightsabers.

The ILMxLab team is doing private demos of the new experiment at the GDC conference this week, but there’s no word yet on if/how/when they intend to release it publicly. Most folks don’t have an HTC Vive laying around just yet, after all — preorders of the Vive wont even ship until April.