In Summer 2016, The Endless Co. transported an audience of 6,000 people from an open-air setting in Prospect Park to the closest region of massive star formation, the Orion Nebula, in a shared virtual reality experience.

As part of the Celebrate Brooklyn Festival, we brought together a 30-piece Norweigan 1B1 Symphony Orchestra, the 100-person Brooklyn Chorus Choir, 2 opera stars (Royce Vavrek and Nathan Gunn), and 6,000 Google Cardboard headsets.

Audience members downloaded our custom mobile app for a five-minute VR journey through the cosmos, directed by Eliza McNitt and narrated by celebrated Hubble astrophysicist Mario Livio.

We worked closely with award-winning Juilliard composer Paola Prestini to design a VR experience driven by the live orchestral performance. Visual effects artists from The Endless Co., who previously worked on the box office hit Gravity, created the galactic VR visuals to be perfectly synchronized with the live music.

The coordination of live performance, spatial audio, and Wi-Fi enabled mobile apps allowed the audience to enjoy a shared VR experience at an unprecedented scale.

Fistful of Stars was an Official Selection for both Cannes and SXSW 2017 and was screened at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

Thousands more experienced and celebrated the project: still, that first Prospect Park performance remains the largest shared VR experience ever accomplished.