On its surface, Marvel’s new “immersive story” What If…?, available to Apple Vision Pro users starting Thursday, seems like a win-win. Marvel gets to mess around with how to combine storytelling and spatial computing, and Apple gets a big-name experience to appease everyone who ponied up $3,500 for their new piece of tech.
But having recently spent an hour or so in Vision Pro’s What If…? universe, I’m not actually sure if it’s a win for anyone outside of the big companies backing it. While it’s initially intriguing and visually complex, the more time you spend within it, the flimsier the experience becomes.
There are great things about the Apple Vision Pro—the see-through display, for instance, or the way it seems to seamlessly track your eye movements. Marvel clearly makes the most of those pluses in What If…?, which pivots off Disney+’s popular animated series about the multiverse to ask what would happen if you, the awkward person in the big headset, were ill-advisedly chosen to harness the power of all six infinity stones. The story finds you hurtling through different dimensions, fighting alongside Marvel heroes and against Marvel villains, all while you’re comfortably seated on your couch.
Make no mistake, What If…? is a story. All parties involved are taking care to call it that. This seems significant given that it certainly isn’t a game—or if it is, it’s one with a hell of a lot of exposition and not much playability.
The vast majority of what you’re tasked with as a user involves hand motions: Make a fist with your fingers facing you and you’ve got a Doctor Strange-like shield. Turn your hand and extend it outward, and you’re suddenly able to control objects—literally just infinity stones, for what it’s worth—with telekinesis. You can open portals, alter the fabric of reality, seal “dangerous beings” away, and send energy blasts from your fists. These tricks, though, are all just based on a series of similar, not very engaging movements, all of which I forgot numerous times over the course of my time in the story. (Luckily, I had Apple publicists there to mind and remind me, though even then it was sometimes hard to know what I was supposed to be doing.)
This lackluster immersion could prove to be a problem. Developed with ILM Immersive, the Lucasfilm interactive studio formerly known as ILMxLab, the What If…? experience is intended to expand Marvel Studios’ work beyond cinemas and Disney+ shows. To, as Walt Disney Studios chief technology officer Jamie Voris puts it, “understand how to tell bigger stories in these new mediums.”
It’s hard to fathom, though, considering the Vision Pro’s somewhat anemic reception, how big of a deal What If…? could be. The headset needs more experiences, and Marvel’s been looking to move beyond its live-action offerings, but the Vision Pro’s hefty price tag puts the experience out of reach for a lot of fans. Even if it’s free, which it is, What If…? may lack the pizazz necessary to draw people in.
When What If…? opens, it’s with a bit of a bang, as first the Marvel Studios logo and then a floating Watcher appear amidst whatever office space you’re set up in. It’s a neat effect, but you’re thrown into the virtual world in short order, tasked with seizing the reality stone from Thanos on Titan. If you were somehow actually fighting him, or if your actions or choices had any sort of impact on the story, this could be cool. Instead, you just get to watch Captain Marvel and Thanos go at it for a bit before the reality stone “splinters” into a bunch of different pieces, which sort of slowly zip across the screen until you “grab” them with your telekinetic palm.
There’s never any danger that you won’t do this—you have all the time in the world and absolutely no opposition—and that’s when you begin to realize the limits of experiencing not-game stories in the Vision Pro. Nothing you can do (save one thing at the very end) can alter the course of the story, no matter how many of the Collector’s cases you try to blast in Knowhere or how awful you are at helping the Red Guardian take down gun turrets in Siberia 1988. (Note: You will be very bad at this, because, at least when I played, it seemed like the blasts were emanating from somewhere near my pinky instead of the center of my fist, making all my shots land—to quote Bob Uecker—just a bit outside.)
The whole thing concludes with a bit of a Choose Your Own Adventure twist. We won’t spoil the end of the story—that’d be a Snap-level bummer—but as fun as it is, it feels like a cruel tease of what could’ve been. A promise that immersive entertainment has yet to really keep.
My hour in What If…? left me kind of meh on the actual technology and gameplay, for lack of a better word, but intrigued by the possibilities. If Marvel’s Vision Pro realm could expand, if there could be multiple chapters, or if you could somehow pace through and explore the universe (GoldenEye-style, the game’s developers and I joked), then it could be really interesting. Just sitting on a couch flopping my hand around like a fish felt anti-climactic, considering I was supposedly tasked with saving all of humanity. Ultimately, it felt like a ride on the Jungle Cruise, in that there was a lot of action and story supposedly happening all around, but at no point did I feel like it was in any way real or dependent on me caring.
Maybe it doesn’t matter that the experience is less than mind-blowing. What If…? is an experiment, and, according to Dave Bushore, the story’s director, the point is to get it in front of “as many eyes as possible,” in part to “continue the conversation” about the brand, the characters, and the boundaries the company is trying to push. That’s part of the reason why Marvel made it free to Vision Pro users, a pool that might be more meager than either the studio or Apple expected when they entered into this partnership over a year ago.
For those without headsets, Bushore says the company is looking into holding events to let Marvel fans try out What If…?, almost making it akin to Avengers: Damage Control—the VR experience that went around to The Void outposts a few years ago.
What If…? is also only the beginning. Voris says part of the reason Disney invested in the project was to expand the notion of what’s possible. “We want to give our creatives a bigger toolbox and a broader palette to paint on,” he says. “I think sometimes you can’t see the second hill until you get to the top of the first hill, and this was our first hill, for sure. But we can see lots of hills beyond it, and we have lots of ideas of things that we’d like to do from here.” Marvel, he contends, has a vision. It’s just hard for everyone to see right now.
