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This year’s winners include Ted Lasso, Saturday Night Live, and Space Explorers: An ISS Experience.

Last night was the 73rd Primetime Emmy Awards, an annual ceremony honoring major achievements within the modern television industry. This year’s winners include Apple’s Ted Lasso, NBC’s Saturday Night Live, HBO’s Last Week Tonight, and other recognizable projects from some of the biggest names in the biz.

This includes immersive entertainment studio Felix & Paul, whose groundbreaking VR film series Space Explorers: An ISS Experience took home a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Interactive Program. This marks the sixth Emmy nomination and third win for Felix & Paul Studios. The studio took home awards for The People’s House – Inside The White House With Barack and Michelle Obama and Inside the Box of Kurios.

Developed in collaboration with TIME Magazine and NASA, the four-part series offers an unprecedented look at life in space. Episode one of the series, “ADAPT,” introduces audiences to professional astronauts Anne McClain, David Saint-Jacques, Christina Koch, and Nick Hague, as they arrive aboard the space station for the first time.

In this one-of-a-kind-VR production, the astronauts themselves served as both the cast and crew. Felix & Paul hooked the crew up with a special camera designed specifically for shooting 360-degree video in a zero-g environment, allowing the team to capture some truly jaw-dropping footage of the ISS as well as planet Earth.

Image Credit: Emmy Awards

Episode two, ADVANCE, offers a closer look at the day-to-day lives of the ISS crew while, simultaneously, shining a spotlight on the many accomplishments of women in space.Episode four, which is scheduled to launch January 2022, will take the series in an exciting new direction with the first-ever 360-footage shot outside the International Space Station. To accomplish this incredible feat, the production team created their own “Outer Space Camera” attached to a “Space Crane.”

Episodes one & two of Space Explorers is available now in 360° mobile format on select 5G-enabled tablets and smartphone, leading Big Screen venues and domes, and in VR on Oculus Quest, Oculus Quest 2, and Oculus Rift headsets. Episode four is scheduled to launch before the end of the year.

Feature Image Credit: Felix & Paul Studios

The seven-part free-roam VR experience spans over 25,000 square feet and features 360-degree footage shot aboard the ISS.

Enter the vastness of outer space in this incredible free-roam VR experience featuring real footage of the International Space Station.

Produced by Felix & Paul Studios in partnership with TIME, The Infinite is a fully immersive VR experience that uses 360-degree stereoscopic footage from the studio’s Emmy-nominated VR film, Space Explorers: The ISS Experience, to transport you aboard the legendary International Space Station.

The exhibit, which is being presented at Arsenal Contemporary Art Montreal, is housed in a massive 12,500 square foot facility. The hour-long experience starts with you putting on a VR headset. You’ll then embark on a multisensory free-roam experience during which you’ll stumble across hidden poetry and immerse yourself in the soundscapes and dynamic light design of the futuristic infinity room.

The project features 200 hours of never-before-seen 360-degree footage taken aboard the ISS. You’ll have the freedom to explore and personalize your experience inside and outside of the legendary space station.

Image Credit: Felix & Paul Studios

“It’s the intimacy we have an opportunity to witness that I find comforting,” said Phoebe Greenberg, The Infinite chief creative officer and the founder of PHI, while speaking to TIME. “There’s such a vastness to the amount of people that are required to get these elite people to space, and from what The Infinite demonstrates, they are still human and bring the Quotidien to space. It makes them all the more relatable, and we don’t get that lens from other media. It’s the intimacy, and we feel the presence of those astronauts.”

There are seven zones that make up The Infinite, each of which is designed to build off the other. The goal is to open your mind to the possibilities of space exploration and space tourism.

Zone 1: Stars Are Coming Out: You assemble in a room with other travelers. A light and sound installation – as if something’s happening outside the walls – begins. Unseen lights reveal a passage. A second door opens and you and your crew are invited to follow the light.
Zone 2: Onboarding: This is when you put on your VR headset and your ascension to the International Space Station awaits you.
Zone 3: The ISS Exploration: Your space exploration begins. This is where you are invited to freely explore the ISS and its contents.
Zone 4: The Overview Effect: This is where you will get to see the Earth in a totally different way. This is what real astronauts see when they look down on Earth from the ISS.
Zone 5: Ryoji Ikeda: This is where things start to get intense. You enter a black square room where you will experience The Universe within the Universe. The pitch-black immensity, the feeling of weightlessness and even the sensation of vertigo will be at the heart of this section.
Zone 6: The Wormhole: You enter an “infinity room” corridor that includes video and sound, representing a return to Earth through a wormhole.
Zone 7: The Origins: Visitors are welcomed in a dark and lightly fragranced room, shaped like a truncated pyramid, where all of their senses are awakened.

To ensure that The Infinite experience focused primarily on humanity instead of the thrill of being in space, the creative team at Felix & Paul Studios consulted with a number of astronauts and cosmonauts. According to Felix & Paul Studios co-founder and Creative Director Félix Lajeunesse, the experience needed to be built around human moments. “When we started this project, we wanted to capture the human experience, to see it through a genuine and intimate connection with the astronauts,” said Lajeunesse.

The Infinite VR experience runs until November 7th, 2021 at Arsenal Contemporary Art Montreal with tickets on sale until September 5th. Due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, additional fall tickets will be offered based on changing guidelines.

Tickets will range in price depending on which days you go and the age range of your group. There is also discounted pricing for groups larger than 10.

For more information check out the exhibition’s website here.

Feature Image Credit: Felix & Paul Studios

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