Virtual reality continues to be an incredible platform for creators to innovate when telling stories and there are plenty of groups taking advantage of this, large and small. Hulu has taken to the medium for news and comedy shows along with the Life brand’s shift into documentary-like VR content, but Within is an entity that was named entirely with VR storytelling in mind.
Continuing its trend of producing high-quality immersive content, Within unveiled a new episode of their science and engineering documentary series called The Possible.
Founded by filmmaker Chris Milk, Within collaborates with companies like Apple, NBC, Vice, and many more to create experiences across a collection of genres. The Possible, made with financial backing from GE, will place viewers face to face with cutting edge technology and discoveries across the life of the serial series. Its second episode is named Listening to the Universe and tackles something that Einstein actually got wrong:
A century ago, Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime—but believed they were so small that humans would never observe them.
More recently, an MIT physics professor did the math and concluded that Einstein was wrong. So he built the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which measures almost infinitesimally small disturbances in spacetime—smaller than anything that’s been measured before. And in 2016, LIGO succeeded, detecting gravitational waves from a massive, faraway collision between black holes.
Pakistani-American astrophysicist Nergis Mavalvala PhD is the MIT physics professor mentioned in the episode’s summary and she’s also known for her pioneering experiments on laser cooling of macroscopic objects and in the generation of squeezed quantum states of light.
If this new episode is any testament to the future stories, The Possible is going to be a very deep dive into science and tech and include collaborations with some of the greatest minds in the world. Listening to the Universe is available in the Within app for iOS, Android, Steam VR, Oculus Home, and PS VR and it’s available to watch on their website as well.
