Have you ever looked around your cramped living room and wished you were sitting at Quark’s bar on Deep Space Nine or on the Bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise (or the U.S.S. Voyager, or even the U.S.S. Cerritos) instead?
If so, you’re in luck! OTOY, Paramount Game Studios, and The Gene Roddenberry Estate broke news via Deadline that there’s going to be a “Roddenberry Archive” app available on the newly released Apple Vision Pro, an augmented or virtual reality headset that Apple is marketing as a spatial computing platform.
The Archive will give Trekkies nearly two hours of Star Trek spatial experiences across the franchise via “hundreds of fully realized locations, artifacts, and unique items—spanning every Star Trek TV show and film across the franchise’s nearly sixty-year history.”
That includes the bridges of multiple starships, all the way from the U.S.S. Discovery to the U.S.S. Protostar on the Prime Timeline (and don’t worry, there are also ships from the Kelvin Timeline, the mirror universe, and myriad other alternative realities we’ve seen over the decades). The Deadline article goes on about the technical specs of the Apple Vision Pro, which frankly didn’t make sense to me beyond the fact that they were trying to convey that the capabilities of the new hardware are impressive.
“Through our multi-decade collaboration with OTOY, we have been working to push the frontiers of immersive technology to fulfill my father’s legacy, creative intent, and ideas in ways that can be experienced today and by generations yet to come,” Rod Roddenberry, President of Roddenberry Entertainment, said in a statement to Deadline.
He added that the Apple Vision Pro offering is “a remarkable milestone in realizing my father’s vision for the Holodeck” and “also fulfills one of my mother’s greatest wishes.”
Roddenberry’s mother, of course, was Majel Barrett, who played several characters in the Star Trek universe including Nurse Chapel in the Original Series, Number One in the series’ initial pilot, “The Cage,” Lwaxana Troi on The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, and the voice of the computer interface you’ve heard across several Trek series.
According to Roddenberry, Barrett recorded her phenoms in 2008 in hopes of preserving her voice for posterity. Through these recordings, her voice now posthumously narrates portions of the archive, which her son understandably found “deeply moving.”
A 2D version of the Archive is available for your review here, for a limited time. Sometime later this year, Apple Vision Pro users will have unlimited viewing time and access to all Trek-related 3D experiences available on The Archive.
