It’s time to don your headset and gloves and brush up on your Joust skills, as Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One is edging every closer to release. To celebrate the upcoming year’s lead-in to its debut, Warner Bros and HTC have partnered to create a number of unique virtual reality companion experiences for the hotly anticipated film.
Ready Player One is a story that takes place almost exclusively within the bounds of virtual reality game Oasis. When it was finally announced that Warner Bros and famed director Steven Spielberg would be making a movie based on the original novel, many expected that some form of virtual reality experience would be released alongside it.
They weren’t wrong, but according to the latest release from Warner and HTC, we can expect several pre- and post-release VR experiences based around Wade Watts and his fellow egg hunters, or Gunters as they’re known in the book.
Although we don’t know exactly what these experiences will involve, we do know that they will be delivered through HTC’s Viveport platform. We’re also told that the games and experiences will be distributed “globally across all VR in-home platforms, from high-end PC-based VR systems to mobile solutions.”
That means Rift and Vive compatibility, but it could also hint at HTC’s future plans for a mobile VR solution of its own.
The Ready Player One movie is slated for release on March 30, 2018, so we still have some time to wait before the movie itself becomes available. It seems from the wording of both Warner Bros. and HTC staffers, though, that we’ll get to experience part of Ready Player One in virtual reality before it arrives.
How hyped are you guys to do some egg hunting of your own? We’re just hoping we get to play out some key movie scenes from Ferris Bueller as Wade Watts.