Spheres review: spatialising the cosmos

Just your average, ordinary, run-of-the-mill experience about listening to the sounds of entire planets and disrupting the fabric of the universe. Eliza McNitt wrote and directed this very trippy non-fiction production, which is one part educational documentary and one part mind-bending cosmic tone poem, with voice-over work from a trio of high-profile narrators: Millie Bobby Brown, Jessica Chastain and Patti Smith. It’s varied and engaging as an experiential work, making good on the difficult challenge of spatialising the cosmos.

While McNitt is credited with the aforementioned labels, this is one of those VR productions in which old school terms like “writer” and “director” don’t seem to cut it. The narration in each of the experience’s three sections—titled Chorus of the Cosmos, Songs of Spacetime, and Pale Blue Dot—was of course written. Very written, you could say, with a tone of meditative reverie, the first chapter for instance beginning: “We are stargazers, peering into the universe, in search of the unknown.”

But “directed” seems inadequate given Spheres’ impressive VR-centric embellishments—from diorama-like galactic environments to haptic feedback and spatialised sound effects. Could “developed” be a better term than “directed”? Or designed? Dimensionalised?

We’re in a blackened outer space tableau when Chorus of the Cosmos begins, and granted the ability to paint streams of fantastic phosphorescent light. This simple but visually engaging activity has a liberating quality that will particularly appeal to people new, or less accustomed, to VR, making us feel like a god faffing about, doodling on the canvas of the cosmos. At some point in the future the ability to draw in multidimensional ways will feel standard, like scribbling on paper. But at the time of publishing it was a novel experience.

McNitt then summons vision of the globe, blueish and pinkish trails wrapping around the rim of it. We’re informed by Millie Bobby Brown that “the universe is full of invisible waves” and “few can be seen with eyes.” She then delivers the first of several instructions strewn throughout Spheres, directing us to “bring your hands together to feel the energy of these waves.” The controllers vigorously vibrate and a visualization of a wavelength appears, which we can bend with our hands—stretching it widely or bringing it close together, like a slinky. It’s a cool effect that shows the experience firing on all cylinders: you see it, hear it, feel it, interact with it. There’s plenty more moments like that spread across Spheres’ half hour-ish runtime. 

I could unpack other choice moments and visual embellishments: the circular cloud-like ring that pulls formations of dust together, for instance, spawning the birth of a star—which you can reach out and feel the energy of. Or the darkened tableau emblazoned with eerie coils of silver light, connected like a spider’s web, which Patti Smith describes as “the beginning of the cosmic Dark Ages.” But rather than going into detail I defer to the words of Morpheus from The Matrix, which are true of every VR experience but especially relevant here: “you have to see it for yourself.” 

Although, having said that, the multi-sensory nature of Spheres calls for that line to be expanded: “you have to see it, hear it, feel it, interact with it for yourself.”