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If you thought the sound of Sir David Attenborough's distinctive soothing tones playing over a closeup of an ant was immersive, you're probably not ready for what's coming next; Attenborough is now taking us 500 million years into the past and deep under the ocean surface in virtual reality film First Life, debuting at the Natural History Museum this June. "To come face to face with ancient creatures such as Opabinia is a wonderful experience," Attenborough tells WIRED.co.uk, referring to the Cambrian-era beast with five eyes and a trunk, which features in the 15-minute film. "These creatures could not be seen like this in any other medium. This is very different from the television documentaries I've worked on before. The art of the filmmaker is to tell the story with different pictures but here you are allowing your subject to select their own pictures."

First Life, a product of UK company Alchemy VR, has been in the works for more than a year, with the team switching over to Samsung's Gear VR hardware when it was released midway through production. The creatures the public will get to explore up-close, including the 500-million-year-old Anomalocaris and worm-like Hallucigenia, are the result of real research being done by the teams at the Natural History Museum, and other experts around the globe. "Integral to many of the reconstructions of some of the creatures were specimens held at the Palaeontology Department in the Natural History Museum, so it's a nice fit to have the experience premiere there where so many of the specimens are kept," Phil Harper, head of digital at Alchemy VR, tells WIRED.co.uk. "Scientists were consulted on how the animals should move, their colour and how they should look and the results are accurate reconstructions of these extinct creatures."


You can get a feel for what to expect from the film in the embedded trailer, which sees Attenborough echoing Harper's sentiment: "You can take these tiny little marks and with total justification, scientific backing, you can make that animal really come to life, come out of the rock and move," the legendary documentary maker tells WIRED.

Alchemy VR, launched last year, is the coming together of two other British companies -- Atlantic Productions and VFX studio Zoo. Both specialise in working with scientists to bring the natural world to life, and had already worked with Attenborough on earlier projects including Natural History Museum Alive for Sky 3D and Rise of the Vertebrates for BBC. Translating that work to VR with the new production company, presented an even greater opportunity for bringing untold stories of the natural world to life, they say. "As film makers, we are used to carefully directing scenes and using narration to tell the story," Harper says. "Using VR, there is freedom for the audience to look around, so we've had to use narration very carefully to allow people to explore, whilst still being guided."

The work was not without its challenges. The video files for a ten-minute experience, he explains, are generally around four to five gigabytes. The file is compressed using high efficiency video coding, but there was a balance to be struck on saving on bandwidth when playing the film through VR, and quality.

The team plans on taking what it's learned from this project and applying those lessons to new 360-degree films on ancient Egypt and further "deep water projects", all unannounced as of yet. And lucky for the public, Attenborough seems sold on the new storytelling medium and will be making further appearances. "VR is a wonderful experience," Attenborough tells WIRED.co.uk. "There are no limits to what can be created and what stories can be told. We're working on a number of projects -- the next of which will be released later this year."

First Life opens to the public at the Natural History Museum on 19 June and will cost £6.50.