‘Ghostbusters VR: Now Hiring’ takes first step towards ‘immersive entertainment’; AR coming soon

PlayStation VR has got a “Ghostbusters” game out and it has been making news all this while. It’s known as “Ghostbusters VR: Now Hiring.” The franchise had already got a taste of VR in the form of a location-based piece, courtesy of “The Void.” But now players can have their own experience at home.

The experience’s first chapter is called “Firehouse” where players take on the role of a newly hired “Ghostbusters” team member, who is required to capture a ghost with a ghost trap and a proton pack. He pokes around the company’s headquarters. The episode has a US$6.99 (AU$9.16 approx) price tag, and the VR experience runs roughly for 10 minutes. It requires PlayStation 4, PS VR headset and PS Move controllers. Players are greeted by a ghost guide named Mooglie, voiced by Patton Oswalt, writes The Verge.

The VR experience has been built by CreateVR and series producer Ivan Reitman has provided his creative inputs. The first episode of “Ghostbusters VR: Now Hiring” is available on Sony PlayStation Store. In terms of structural and formal characteristics of VR, the game doesn’t push boundaries, and is pretty simple to play and concise. VR is such a medium that is being experimented on a lot by various developers. VR has an immense emotional impact on audiences.

Players have found interacting with the game’s environment very immersive and intuitive. They have to choose a spot by pressing a button on the Move controllers and then teleport. Controller buttons reposition the player 90 degrees to right or left. The trigger button on the move controller makes it easy to use all the weapons. Players can master them easily. The episode ends with a cliff-hanger, but it’s just the first episode on a multi-chapter story. Reports suggest that the second chapter is already raring to be released.

“I think the real complexity is in the storytelling rules. I remember getting into philosophical arguments right off the bat about whether you can edit. Whether you can change lenses. Whether you can just cut into another room, as opposed to going through some fade out and fade in ... We're really at the scale of watching silent movies on a white wall, where people are still worried about cutting to a close-up, because then they think the train is coming through the wall,” Reitman explains to The Verge.

Sony Pictures Entertainment’s senior vice president of virtual reality, Jake Zim, believes that VR is the tech of today and augmented reality is also coming very quickly. Stay tuned on IBT AU for more updates on “Ghostbusters VR: Now Hiring.”