“Space Explorers” at Stanley Marketplace is eye-popping fun, but lags behind VR trailblazers

Living in 2024 means enduring ads for Apple’s new Vision Pro, a $4,000, virtual-reality headset that projects interactive images over a 3-D view of your surroundings. It’s a step beyond existing VR headsets (“spatial computing,” as Apple calls it) from Meta and Sony and, yes, it’s something most of us are going to ignore until it becomes much cheaper.

That only enhances the appeal of touring VR shows. Why visit an arcade, or buy your own pricey headset, when you can just sample a big-budget “mixed reality” experience?

The Denver run of “Space Explorers: The Infinite” answers that question with 45 minutes of gorgeous imagery and compelling science, but also a few technological hiccups.

The VR-driven show, running through May 5 at the Hangar in Aurora’s Stanley Marketplace, is an experiment in scaling a singular experience into a mass gathering. It’s a fine introduction to the technology for newbies, cracking open a window to the International Space Station and letting you “explore” its geometric innards. Much of the imagery, especially that taken outside the station, is stunning and unique.

But having already played for around 300,000 people, this is not the most dazzling, up-to-date version of VR you’ll find. Putting a show like this together takes a while, and immersive technology — VR in particular — has made leaps and bounds over the past three years. If you’ve used Sony’s PSVR2 or Meta’s Quest 3 headset, then this show (which employs last-gen Quest 2 headsets, according to an employee) may feel more terrestrial than it should.

That’s not so bad when it’s a more artistic or cinematic experience, such as the groundbreaking “Carne y Arena,” which ran at the Stanley in 2020. That show’s balance of tech and artistic elements felt natural.

“Space Explorers” feels more rigid, perhaps befitting its subject matter. Visitors are admitted in groups that snake around stanchions flanked with huge images of astronauts and their personal stories. This is not a program of NASA, but you might think so based on the slick presentation. Visitors then receive a VR primer from a human guide before entering a strobing room that looks and feels like a Meow Wolf exhibit. They then join a line to receive their headsets from a conveyor belt.

All VR headsets, even the best ones, take some time to adjust properly, and these Quest 2 goggles fit nicely right off the bat. Even with my eyeglasses, the picture was almost always in focus. But by design, the weight of the headset may rest too much on your nose or forehead, which is not the most pleasant feeling when you’re trying to forget it’s there.

From there, you’re through the 3-D looking glass. You enter a spare, wide room (not that you can see it with the goggles on) and witness other visitors as celestial avatars composed of stars. People who you don’t know are colored blue, people in your own group are gold, and roaming employees are green. Simply raising your hand will call one over if you need help.

As the show began, one side of my headphones cut out; an employee quickly came and fixed it. However, my 11-year-old son’s headset crashed entirely, requiring 5 minutes of troubleshooting and a reboot in the middle of the room that ruined the feeling of immersion. Some of it could be user error: visitors are told not to sit down, go past red-lined barriers, or walk backward, and some did, stepping on toes and buffeting the feel that there were too many people in the space. It wasn’t always clear how close to you another person was, given the imprecision of their avatar placement.

And yet it was nice not to be tethered by a cord, as most home headsets are. Once inside the virtual station, there are floating orbs you can touch to open up 3-D videos and images. Real astronauts, using 360-degree cameras, address viewers about living and working in space, and the feeling of being in the room with them can be startling. (The footage was first filmed for the 2021 Emmy Award-winning film “Space Explorers: The ISS Experience.”)

These are not 3-D environments in the traditional, video-game sense. If you try to look around a corner or lean too far in any direction after triggering one of them, the experience abruptly ends. Despite the untethered headsets, there are multiple points where you must stand still, even as other visitors stream around you.