Project Lux review — The first VR anime movie.
Project Lux is the first ever interactive VR movie. Unlike Henry and Invasion! that only plays for a few minutes long, Project Lux is a complete anime movie with 80 minutes of content. It was created by Spicy Tails, a small creators’ group in Japan. And the story was written by Isuna Hasekura, the author of the popular light novel Spicy and Wolf, Magudala de Nemure, and the visual novel WORLD END ECONOMiCA series. Project Lux can be played using both Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, and it comes with the full controller support, but the primary interaction is through gaze, which the controller is used mostly for accessing the game menu.
The story set in a futuristic world where most humans had mostly abandoned their body and turned their brain into cyberbrain. However, there was a girl named Lux who lives in a place far away from the city and do not want to be cyberized. Lux was a talented artist who creates entertainment applications. And the protagonist (or you) was a public servant who visits Lux asking her to develop applications that can evoke human emotions. In this futuristic world, everything can be simulated by the computer, humans can communicate through transmitting data, and emotion can be invoked through electrical signals. Art and music no longer exist since it is way more efficient to exchange these “feelings” through electrical signals rather than relying on the creation of any “masterpiece.”
As the story goes, you two are going to have numerous conversation around how to define “I”. When a person’s memory and emotion can be easily extracted and replaced with another, are you still you? When your consciousness becomes part of the collective consciousness, do you still by all mean exist? And how can you differentiate yourself from the others? The protagonist of Project Lux was a cyborg that his real body was “resting” at somewhere and was using a robotic body for work. Lux, on the other hand, was a real human being who does not want to become part of the collective consciousness. Lux was afraid of losing herself and what she knew, felt, and experienced in her life. When becoming part of the collective consciousness, there would be no boundary between human minds, and what she possessed will no longer belong to her anymore. When the story came to an end, you will have to make a decision, a decision that will determine yours and Lux’s fate.
It was hard to consider Project Lux a “game.” It was more like an immersive movie that asks you to think through these philosophical questions. And although it was advertised that there are multiple endings, there were actually only two endings, a good one and a bad one. Project Lux should be classified as a visual novel, one of the most popular game genres in Japan. Visual novel games emphases on the story that the game is mostly about reading the text, watching CG, and listening to the voice acting and atmospheric music. Although some people might find it boring, for me, it is the ultimate medium for storytelling, and it was not surprising that Isuna Hasekura built Project Lux as an extension of the visual novel by adding the VR element to it. And I can confidently say that it was a success. It did what it intended to do, using VR to demonstrate a new way of storytelling. Project Lux was more immersive than any other anime or film that I have ever watched. The virtual world invited you to become part of the story. Yes, you were not the one who talks to Lux, but you were there, you were the one who advanced the story, and you were the one who decided Lux’s fate. What I had experienced was a brand new way of storytelling, and I enjoyed the feeling of becoming part of the story.
That said, the story of Project Lux was ….. OK. It was not bad, but there was not so much to say or discuss. Part of the reason was that the topic addressed in Project Lux has being discussed intensively in many modern movies and novels, and to be honest, the others had done a way better job. I can quickly think of two big names that might have inspired Project Lux, Ghost in the Shell and Evangelion. In the 1995 anime movie Ghost in the Shell, the protagonist, as a cyborg whose only organic part was her brain that enclosed in the robotic body, Motoko Kusanagi could not stop thinking about self-identity, about how she can prove that she is what she is. So when she met The Puppet Master, a robot who held self-consciousness, she inevitably began to wonder what she remembered, felt, and experienced were real or were just electric signals, and the world she lives was only in her dream, and this led to a series of incidents. The same concept can be found in Project Lux, the cyberized brain, the robotic body, the implanted memory and emotion, and the back and forth conversation between you and Lux surrounding the difference between a real human and a cyborg, all reminded me about this masterpiece.
Another title that might have influenced Project Lux a lot is Evangelion. The main plot of Evangelion is about the Human Instrumentality Project, a project that meant to remove the A.T. field, a barrier that encloses every mind that exists. When the A.T. field is eliminated, one’s mind will be no longer distinguishable from the others, which will create a state of being for humanity where no individual existed that will eventually lead to an extremely homogenized world. The flaws in every living being can be complemented by the strengths in others, thus filling the gaps and erasing the insecurities in people’s hearts. I believe Project Lux had adopted some key concepts from Evangelion, the conversation about becoming part of the collective consciousness and sharing the knowledge and feeling with others seemed familiar to me, it’s like another Human Instrumentality Project.
However, I will have to say, that it is unfair to compare Ghost in the Shell and Evangelion to Project Lux, a small, exploratory project. Actually, the problem with the two titles was that it was very difficult to comprehend. I had a hard time understand what Ghost in the Shell was talking about, even with all the additional annotations as there were so many metaphors, quotes, symbols, and background images that had severely affected your understanding of the plot. Project Lux, on the other hand, did not use any jargon, metaphor, or quote. The point they were trying to make was pretty straight forward, but it did plant something deep in your mind, something that might motivate you to think more after taking the headset off. And although you two were discussing something serious, Lux’s cute and vivid behavior has turned the whole conversation to something you can enjoy. (Well, I am not a big fan of its ending though……)
Well, although the game itself was interesting, I cannot recommend it to others, at least for what it is right now. This is not about personal taste of Japanese anime or characters, but more of the overall system and gameplay design. Firstly, the game was……boring. The story itself was good, but the gameplay was not so fun. There was no background music or ambient noise, just you and Lux talking. You cannot interact with any objects in the scene and you should not move your body away from where you are. (or you will see your own “body“ remains at the original location, without a head) So basically, the only thing you can do is to listen to the conversation. Secondly, the caption was difficult to read. The voiceover was in Japanese, so if you do not understand Japanese, you are out of luck. You will have to read the caption that appears at the lower part of your field of view. The readability in VR at the peripheral vision area is already bad due to the image distortion, and since both HTC Vive and Oculus Rift use Fresnel lens, it resulted in a strong screen-door effect. For the English caption it was OK, but for Chinese, because of the nature of character complexity, I found some characters were merely recognizable. On top of that, to read the caption, you will have to constantly rotate your eyeballs down (as it follows your head position) which causes tiredness to your eyes after the first two episodes. Lastly, there was only one scene in the game. The only scene in the game, the wooden house was well modeled, but all other scenes, including the environment scene outside the house, were all just skybox. For a VR game, I expected to see some variations instead of the same scene over and over again.
So to conclude, Project Lux was a really good try. It was the first ever complete VR anime movie. And although I cannot say that it was content-rich, it did demonstrate how we could make the storytelling more immersive by using VR. Lux was well modeled and animated that it felt real and vivid, and the scene in the game was beautiful and interesting. Although the game lacks interaction in the virtual world, it was still one of the most interesting experience I have ever had. And most importantly, Project Lux was one of the best examples showing how VR can bring storytelling to the next level.
