Award-winning multimedia studio Signal Space Lab announced work on a new interactive live-action experience called Afterlife last year, aiming to create a deeply meaningful film looking at grief. The studio has just announced that it plans on releasing the film across several formats next month.

Even though Afterlife is a 360-degree film, Signal Space Lab developed its own in-house technology to give the audience control of the 29 branching choices. Viewers can intuitively affect the story by showing interest in one character over another, meaning each playthrough can be completely different, offering thousands of unique, story-driven options.

Afterlife’s story centres around one family’s grief after a tragedy as they struggle to deal with their new reality. Experienced through the eyes of a young child, viewers uncover their own version of the story, as they interact with objects and follow characters simply by sight.

Because the studio develops IP’s and techniques across two specialized Visual and Audio labs, one of the prototypes it made for live-action interaction was taken to Cannes 2018, becoming the groundwork for Afterlife, now dubbed Seamless Interactive Cinematic VR which removes loading screens.

Signal Space Lab will be releasing Afterlife in May, supporting Oculus Rift, Oculus Go, Samsung Gear VR, SteamVR, HTC Vive, PlayStation VR, and mobile devices using iOS and Android. Part of a trilogy, the first will be free to try out, while the complete experience will be $9.99 USD.

The studio has previously worked on hybrid experience We Happy Few: Uncle Jack Live VR in collaboration with Compulsion Games and Gearbox Publishing. VRFocus will continue its coverage of Afterlife in the run up to launch, reporting back with any further updates.