As we have said several times, apart from watching movies, there is not much to do with Apple’s Vision Pro once the novelty has worn off. That’s why when Apple announced a new mixed reality experience with Marvel in the form of an adventure called “What If…? An Immersive Story experience”, many were excited.
The companies promised a mixed reality show that “would surpass the limits of technology”. But what analysts who have been able to play it have experienced, although very nice to look at, ended up seeming more like a too long video game tutorial with no game to follow.
What is Marvel’s adventure in Apple’s Vision Pro?
In the exclusive Vision Pro application, the user remains still in a virtual environment, observes how things unfold, and participates when asked, or moves around the environment while three-dimensional augmented reality characters shaded with cells speak to them.
The player portrays the “Hero of the Multiverse”, an unnamed character who is recruited by The Watcher, narrator of the Disney Plus series, to save the multiverse by acquiring the Infinity Stones.
But Wong, the Master of the Mystic Arts and friend of Doctor Strange in the MCU, opposes your participation because, well, who the hell are you? But he reluctantly trains you, and then you embark on a journey through realities to acquire each Infinity Stone for vague reasons of the multiverse’s destiny.
Along the way, you acquire various skills and Wong teaches you special gestures to activate them. You can wave your hands to banish your opponents to the pocket dimension inside the Soul Stone or clench your fist to shoot laser fists with the Power Stone.
These things are really fun, but they are also very limited by the fact that you can only do them at scheduled times. That would be fine if the story was compelling, but it is not given any room to be so.
It is nothing more than a series of brief vignettes that serve as preparation for the next interactive section, and then they drop you off to find the stone you are looking for, at which point you learn a new skill that you may or may not use again later. Each vignette basically follows the same pattern and ends up giving the feeling that something is being built that is never worth it.
But the final result, analysts say, is an experience that falls short of being a video game or a movie and remains in an unsatisfying middle ground. However, some people have really liked it.
