Star Wars has always served as a catalyst for innovation. George Lucas’s 1977 film redefined the summer blockbuster, Industrial Light & Magic transformed the visual effects industry, and even the much-maligned Star Wars prequels pioneered performance capture technology with Jar Jar Binks. That’s not to mention Pixar (hatched from Lucasfilm’s The Graphics Group), Skywalker Sound, THX and LucasArts’s contribution to the video game industry.

Star Wars’s ability to take audiences to a galaxy far, far away has always been one of it’s great strengths, so it’s perhaps no surprise to see the franchise explore the exciting terrain of virtual reality. That’s being driven by ILM’s nascent “immersive entertainment” division, ILMxLAB. Founded in 2015, ILMxLAB’s executive in charge is Vicki Dobbs Beck, whose career with Lucasfilm stretches back to Willow and Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade.

Speaking at GTC 2019, Beck said that ILMxLAB was born out of the question “what’s next?” for cinema, TV and video games. “We started seeing disruptive technologies being announced: virtual reality, mixed reality, new application for mobile,” she explained. “We believed that these devices would allow us new ways to convey emotion and establish deep and intimate connections to story and place. We felt these were opportunities worth pursuing and so we launched ILMxLAB. We wanted to be pioneers, and our goal was to allow people to step inside our stories.”

Though still in its infancy, the division has been quick to experiment with VR and MR (mixed reality) storytelling. VR game Jakku Spy arrived on the Star Wars app in 2015 in support of The Force Awakens, while 2016 saw the arrival of Trials On Tatooine and Rogue One prequel tie-in Recon A Star Wars 360 Experience. ILMxLAB backed ventures outside the Star Wars universe, too, notably Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena, which sees participants put into the shoes of migrants crossing the US-Mexico border.