"It’s like VR was almost made for holding lightsabers," says Lucasfilm chief technology officer Rob Bredow, who introduced the project to a small group of journalists at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. With the lightsaber, you’ll deflect the stormtroopers’ incoming (but strangely slow) blaster fire back at them with deadly results, holding them off until the Falcon can make its escape.

According to ILMxLab creative director John Gaeta, Trials on Tatooine was the result of the team’s conversations while filming The Force Awakens. "We were basically having a sort of fetishistic relationship with the Millennium Falcon last year, so that was actually one of the starting points, oddly — that we wanted to feel its actual scale and sort of what it was like to actually be there with it," he says. "It was that simple in the beginning." From there, they tried to imagine how someone might want to interact with the world, whether through tinkering, fighting, or both.

Contrary to some speculation when its trailer leaked last week, Trials on Tatooine isn’t a game or full-fledged interactive experience. It’s the equivalent of a single movie scene, with no firm plans to develop it further or send it out for release. This puts it in the company of several Star Wars-themed prototypes that ILMxLab has developed in the past few years. In one, viewers used a tablet to watch a scene of stormtroopers hunting for R2-D2 and C-3PO on Tatooine, but with the option of switching locations and perspectives to uncover different threads of the plot. Another, released for Google Cardboard on the Star Wars mobile app, offered hints about the plot of The Force Awakens in the lead-up to the movie’s December release.

"It’s like VR was almost made for holding lightsabers."

As a piece of the Star Wars mythos, though, it’s unusually ambitious. Until now, the group tended to use virtual and augmented reality to flesh out well-known parts of the existing Star Wars films, offering extra scenes or an alternative perspective. But Trials on Tatooine is a rare glimpse into the still-enigmatic time period between the original trilogy and its latest sequel, taking place at some point before a cataclysmic betrayal that sets up The Force Awakens. Small as it is, it’s telling the kind of story that might otherwise appear in the Star Wars universe’s many extended universe books, comics, and TV shows.

"[Trials on Tatooine] was just what it was called — an experiment," says Lucasfilm executive planner Vicky Dobbs Beck. "We learned a lot about first-person storytelling — about how you balance interaction with story — and that'll be valuable information as we conceive our future experiences."

Gaeta hints that this could be exactly where ILMxLab’s VR experiments are headed. "Normally, what we would be inclined to do would be to have you dropping into something for which there was a lot of context going in," he says. "If we weren't doing that, for certain we would want to serialize this, right? We would want to build over time until such a point where things started to really gel." This was the format of ILMxLab’s pre-Force Awakens VR teaser, Jakku Spy. But like many other VR developers, the team may still be determining how to pull it off for a more standalone project. "It's a difficult thing to do short-form anything in VR, for the same reason it's hard to have enough exposition in [short-form] cinema," says Gaeta. "So no, that is not at this time part of a series. But that's the approach that we would take in general."