Holy shit, we're all fired up for Christopher Nolan's save the world space epic, Interstellar. It doesn't hit theaters until November 7, but in the meantime I got to experience a little bit of it with the help of an Oculus Rift.


All we know about Interstellar is what we've seen in a couple of trailers that, while lacking in plot detail, will definitely make you want to pay the 13 bucks to see this movie. Basically scientists discover a wormhole and Matthew McConaughey must leave his family in order to explore this connection between space and time, thus saving humanity. Interested? I know I am!

The Interstellar Oculus experience gives you a few minutes to enter into McConaughey's world, i.e. the space ship that'll take him into the great beyond. You sit in a reclining seat, don the Oculus and some headphones, and voila! There you are in your spaceship, in which you'll fly past the sky. This is obviously a marketing ploy for the movie, but it doesn't mean you can't enjoy it.


The visuals are so good you actually feel like you're bouncing through a spaceship. The experience lasts just about three minutes: You enter, look around as you head to the cockpit, and look out into the space beyond. At one point, you get to float around in "zero-gravity," or rather the Oculus gives you a lighter sensation and your chair moves.

But you feel a bit of that sensation you get when you ride a rollercoaster where your stomach goes up and down. Then the experience ends with you sitting in your seat, strapping in, and getting ready to take off into the wormhole. I could hear a British man in the seat next to me yelling "oh my god, this is amazing" over and over as I got to the control panel. Oculus is definitely the most amazing when you try it for the first time, but I wanted to say, I feel you, man. But I had a headset on.

In any case, once I get to the end, I looked to my left to see if Matthew McConaughey was sitting in the seat next to me. It's Oculus—anything is possible. Sadly, there was no Matthew McConaughey sitting in the seat next to me. But I still enjoyed my few minutes in space, and it definitely did its job in making me even more excited to see Interstellar.


You can try the Interstellar Oculus Rift experience out in the following four places on the dates listed: New York's AMC Lincoln Square 13 (October 6-8); Houston's AMC Gulf Pointe 30 (October 17–19); Los Angeles' AMC City Walk (October 25–27); and Chantilly, Virginia's Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center (November 5–19).