In a move that will bring news readers into the stories that most interest them, magazine publisher Time Inc. announced Thursday the launch of its mixed-reality app Time Immersive, which will showcase immersive 3-D journalism.

The app, available for both Android and iOS, will bring new augmented and virtual reality projects from Time to the fingertips and eyeballs of users.

The first feature coming to Time Immersive is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing with “Landing on the Moon.” The feature is designed to be a scientifically and historically accurate cinematic recreation of the Apollo 11 landing in photorealistic 3-D AR projected on any tabletop at home.

“With ‘Landing on the Moon’, Time is building on its decades of trusted and authoritative space reporting to tell this story in a brand new way, just as we have done in previous projects such as our Emmy Award-winning documentary ‘A Year in Space,’”said Edward Felsenthal, Time editor in chief and chief executive. The project is sponsored by Jimmy Dean and produced in partnership with Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

A teaser for the feature is also available as a mobile web AR experience to allow a wider audience to understand and experience the technology.

“The National Air and Space Museum’s Apollo collection is the largest in the world …whose Apollo-era reporting helped shape the way Americans experienced the space race,” said Nick Partridge, who leads strategic partnerships for the Museum and co-directed the Apollo 50 national celebration.

The “Landing on the Moon” project is presented as a tour de force production as the result of more than 20 years of research and artistry by John Knoll, chief creative officer of Industrial Light & Magic. It was built on 3-D assets provided by Knoll and the Smithsonian’s Digitization Office.

“This AR activation brings our artifacts to life like never before, and we hope it inspires a new generation to define their own 21st century Moonshot,” added Partridge.

The production features immersive spatial sound design by Erik Lohr, head of audio at immersive media studio RYOT, with voice over by Time’s Jeffrey Kluger.

The Time Immersive app and mobile web AR experience were built on Amazon Inc.’s Sumerian, a VR experience creation tool, and developed by mixed-reality studio Trigger Global Inc. The software was also developed in partnership with the Yahoo News XR Partner program, so the experience is also available on the Yahoo News app.

As VR and AR slowly gain traction across consumer industries outside of gaming and entertainment, journalism outfits have been looking to using this new medium. Quartz Media LLC launched its own AR app using ARKit for iOS devices in 2017. Its first feature, too, involved a spacecraft: a life-sized AR re-creation displaying an accurate model of the Cassini-Huygens probe, which had recently ended its 20-year mission to study Saturn and its moons.

Mainstream news organization CNN officially formed its own VR journalism division in 2017 as well, making its debut with an immersive video story about the “running of the bulls” event in Pamplona, Spain. The same year, Getty Images Inc. teamed up with high-quality cinematic VR producer Jaunt Inc.

Downloads for the app and more information about the project are available on the Time Immersive website. The app can also be downloaded directly from the Android and iOS app stores.

Image: Time