While the Science Museum remains one of London’s quintessential free days out, there’s an ever-growing list of paying bolt-ons for those who are happy to spend a little (or a lot), from the glorious hands on experiments of the WonderLab to the retro videogames mecca of Power Up to a very decent science afternoon tea featuring petri dish jellies and test tubes filled with sweets.
Joining them is Smithsonian Starstruck, a galactic VR experience from America’s prestigious Smithsonian Institution, in which the 360 digital imaginings of some of space’s most stunning and surreal vistas are rooted in hard astronomy, and not the fanciful slop that creeps into several nominally educational London VR experiences I could name.
It's basically a guide to all the mad shit in our galaxy, with a reassuring-voiced American man taking us on a virtual journey around various observatories and space telescopes, and the wild celestial phenomena they can nominally see. We watch the dawn of the universe. We visit an uninhabitable planet strewn with diamonds. We stand before the event horizon of a black hole. It is all, undeniably, pretty visually stunning: from a looming gigantic sun on another world to the bizarre spectacle of light being dragged into a physics-defying gravity well, this is spectacular (albeit, to be clear, often an interpretation of what these things might look like given available data). You’ll also learn a decent amount about the phenomena depicted without feeling aggressively lectured.
Is it a great attraction? Call me a luddite, but I wonder if it really justifies the VR format. Walking around a bit doesn’t really add anything to the films. A handful of gimmicky interactive bits add less. It would surely have been at least as effective in the Museum’s IMAX. Plus maybe it was teething issues, but while my headset showed me avatars of everyone in my group, there were people I couldn’t see – presumably from other groups – who kept bumping into me. And while the prices aren’t heinous, it is the most expensive sub-attraction in the museum (and you can’t purchase a year’s return pass like other paying areas).
Don’t get me wrong: if you like space, VR or ideally space and VR, you’ll have a blast. But in a museum where Power Up and the WonderLab are absolute must-sees, Smithsonian Starstruck is more of a nice bonus than an essential.
