'The Martian' News Update: The Martian VR Experience Available in Game Developers Conference

"The Martian" is a blockbuster hit. Who would not be impressed with Matt Damon's wit, spirit and survival skills in the film anyway? If you want to experience Damon's character, you can now try it.

According to Fortune, "The Martian VR Experience" is available at the Game Developers Conference (GDC.) GDC started last Mar. 14 and will run until Mar. 18. Per the report, this event offers attendees the chance to live like Mark Watney (Damon's character and the lead star in "The Martian") for 25 minutes.

Per the report, the "The Martians" VR experience was developed at the Fox Innovation Lab with the joint effort of the RSA Films and Robert Stromberg's The VR Company (VRC). "The Martian" director Ridley Scott is the executive producer of the experience while Stromberg helmed the project.

"Once I met with Fox I realized we all had the same ambition in exploring virtual reality and The Martian was just entering post-production," Stromberg said.

"We treated the project like a normal film production. I wrote a script that was approved, then worked with The Martian editorial team. While they were cutting the film, we were working on the VR entity. We worked with the VFX (visual effects) companies to get the models from the film in the VR experience, which ended up being very helpful," he added.

"The Martian" VR experience will enable one to get through the plot of the film's story with a variety of interactive elements for users to explore using Facebook's Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive.

What can users do? To get a full VR experience of "The Martian," users can drive a rover across Mars, pilot a ship through space and play basketball using potatoes. All of these offer a 360-degree perspective on the environments.

Stromberg added that they will do more VR products in the future and will plan ahead of time because they learned a lot in the first project.

"The Martian" VR Experience is created using Epic Game's Unreal Engine 4 game technology. The same software powers the Paranormal Activity VR game that also debuts at GDC.

Unreal Engine 4 is a free software for game development, virtual reality, architecture, film and education. Most high-tech games already use this because it transforms 2D games into impressive high-end visuals that you can deploy to iOS and Android devices.