Masters of the Sun VR is a VR graphic novel adaptation presented by the Black Eyed Peas. Fresh off buzz from at Sundance, it’s available now on Samsung Gear VR. Despite some performance issues on the Gear with my S7, I think this is one of the most promising episodic VR experiences yet!
Black Eyed Peas and Marvel Comics previously teamed up on a comic book called “Masters of the Sun – the Zombie chronicles”. The VR adaptation lets you control the story and brings some much-needed hip hop energy to VR.
What I like the most is Master of the Sun has a unique feel, not a quite a video game, not quite photo realistic, but a vibe I havent quite felt in VR yet.
You’re in the comic…
As you turn around and explore youll see a record rack, and some comics, looks amazing in the headset….
Translating the subtlety of a comic books tone to an immersive format isn’t easy. Most experiments I’ve seen go backwards. Somehow adding interactivity often takes away from the magic you remember.
Master of the Sun overcomes that, with creative use of rendering style, perspective, music, even the fonts – all coming together to give you an enhanced sense of wonder in a comic book world. The story and the richness make it worthy of VR’s enhanced ability to look around and soak it in, it feels immersive, curious, familiar, new all at once. At each decision point, I found myself looking around, soaking in the environment, before moving the story forward.
The experience itself is broken up into a series of separate episodes, or VR graphic novels but I only wish they would have gone higher end and made this for the VIVE. There were issues on the Gear, it couldnt quite keep up with my head movements and some of the camera pans made me a little motion sick. The story and quality begs for more!
But I can see past all of that for the great moments. This feels like new ground on the path to VR becoming legitimate medium for stories. According to Forbes the team has grander ambitious
“From this, we now are planning to leverage the project into becoming a full VR studio,” adds Taboo. “Other artists who we know from Rihanna to Usher all want to do something with VR. We’re in a perfect position to collaborate them and others for the VR space because of what we are doing and who we are,” will.i.am told me. “We’ve got the whole system down. We created the prototypes to this project and demos in order to get the other artists on board with MOTS, and once they could see the vision, we just kept building from that.”
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