Review: “What If?” shows off the Vision Pro’s strengths
Marvel Studios and ILM’s “What If…? – An Immersive Story” for Vision Pro, launching Thursday as a free app, isn’t an immersive video or a game. It’s something in between—a mixed-media experiment, roughly an hour long, that tries to use every feature of the Vision Pro to make a compelling entertainment experience.
Based on the Disney+ animated series (and, more distantly, the Marvel comic), “What If?” is built around the premise of variant versions of famous Marvel characters. The “What If?” comic was doing multiverse stories decades before they were cool.
In the new “What If?” immersive story, you’re called by The Watcher (the narrator and main character of the TV series, filling Rod Serling’s shoes but with a bit more agency) to intervene in various multiversal crises, aided by Sorcerer Supreme Wong, who equips you with magic spells to use during your adventure.
The scenes with The Watcher and Wong don’t take place in a fantasy world—they’re augmented reality scenes set in wherever you’re using the Vision Pro. It’s pretty funny to see The Watcher towering above Wong, his head clearly too tall to fit in my house (but somehow doing it anyway). In addition to augmented reality, the app contains extended animated scenes (very much like segments from the TV show, but in 3-D and displayed via a sort of crystal shard floating in front of you) and quite a few immersive environments.
I really enjoyed the environments, which are cleverly designed to resemble the style of the animated “What If?” TV series, but upgraded a bit so that they make sense in a 3-D, 360-degree context. I was especially impressed by a few surprising easter eggs littered around, and the design of a see-through pod containing something very interesting.
The environments are interactive in the sense that you can look around and drink them in, but you don’t really interact with them directly beyond that. You don’t move around, and your only interaction that effects the scene is when you cast spells. (If you want to revisit those environments later, and just look around, you can—the app lets you revisit any of its “chapters” from the main menu.)
Oh, casting spells: The app makes the clever choice of building the entire interactive mechanic around magic, which makes sense because—like the Vision Pro itself—Marvel Universe magic is controlled via hand gestures. Wong will train you to shield yourself, fire power blasts, seal away dangerous objects, and collect others.
If this all sounds very much like a video game… it’s not. There’s a reason the app is subtitled An Immersive Story: Your actions (while very fun!) are really just there to make the story move along. There’s no way to lose. The story will wait for you to complete your task, and then it continues on. It’s all done in a very subtle way—the music plays, the action continues—but “What If?” is trying to be an engaging story that you’re present in, not a game. Consider that this app is from two Disney-owned companies, and consider it sort of like an interactive theme park ride. You can do stuff, but you can’t really change the ride.
That is, except for one point in the story, where you’re offered a choice. It’s a real, legitimate “final choice” that results in different endings depending on what you choose. It’s the lightest dollop of branching on a story that otherwise goes in a straight line—clearly the budget of this project was not high enough to create numerous scenes that will only be seen by the fraction of the viewers who make those specific choices—but it’s a fun moment nonetheless.
It’s hard to judge “What If?” overall, because it really does seem like a sampler platter of ways this sort of entertainment could evolve in the future. Is there room for something that’s more interactive than watching TV, but less interactive than a full-on video game? I have no idea. But I do know that the hour I spent with “What If?” was maybe the best hour I’ve spent on the device since I got it. If Apple is looking for a single app that demonstrates all the features of the Vision Pro at its best, “What If?” may be the answer.
The making of “What If…?”
I got a chance to briefly talk to two people involved in making the app — Indira Guerrieri, technical art director, and Joe Ching, lead experience designer.
Guerrieri on translating the animated series to full environments: “At the beginning, it was all, ‘we’ve got this gorgeous artwork and these gorgeous characters, and we got to make them right.’ And then all sorts of discussion started happening around how much do we actually make it a little more realistic so that it feels like you’re in a 3D space? I remember the discussions were, do we want to make it more sort of toonish, do we want to add marks of a pencil from a toon-rendered drawing, or do you want to leave it? So we went somewhere in between.”
Ching on the level of interactivity in the app: “It was actually a very conscious decision that we made… we did not want any kind of a health bar where you say, ‘Oh, I died, and now I have to start this thing over.’ We really wanted it to be where the player could just do whatever they wanted in this world and not really have any sort of consequence to either not engaging or engaging. So that way, anybody at any skill level could really get through and sort of get the entire storyline.
“There are going to be particular players who are going to be focused on the narrative and going to want to sit there and watch everything that happens in front of them, and then there are going to be people who just want to, you know, take the time to look around. And that goes back to the no-consequences of, ‘If I don’t do anything, I’m not going to die.’ So that if a player only has 10 minutes and they just want to take a look at the environments, they can do that. There are some Easter eggs here and there. So, it’s really how the player wants to go through there, if they want to engage, and also the idea of replayability. You can play through the storyline the first time and then just go through and just appreciate everything that Indira and the art team have done. So, it’s sort of a play as you like.”
Guerrieri on targeting the Vision Pro: “We designed the project for a device that has so much range, that was the beauty of it. It’s like, you can go, ‘Yeah, I can do color. I can do, you know, nuance in the way things look.’ It’s pretty cool. That was a joy, to work with that range.”
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