LAS VEGAS—Three ships approach a space station. One, the smallest, is marked NX-01. The second, familiar, NCC-1701. Finally, proudest, the NCC-1701-A. Something is clearly wrong here.
If that paragraph made any sense to you, you're probably nervously awaiting the new Star Trek: Discovery series coming soon to CBS All Access. Today here at CES, smartphone maker Alcatel said that it will host and sponsor new VR content connected with the series between now and its May 2017 launch.
If you aren't a Trekker, the gag in the teaser they showed me is that the three ships in the VR video never existed at the same time in the Trek universe; they're hundreds of years apart in age. (Although, given time travel shenanigans, anything is possible.)
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The VR videos and interactive experiences could include being able to observe or walk through the bridge of the Discovery ship, explore planets that will be featured in the show, and get histories of Star Trek technologies or behind-the-scenes experiences, said Steve Cistulli, president of TCL Mobile North America, Alcatel's parent company. "This is about us giving to the Star Trek community," he said.
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Cistulli, a fan of the original Star Trek series, said that while Alcatel is the official smartphone partner of Discovery, it's thankfully not aiming at traditional product placement (the Nokia car phone in the 2009 Star Trek movie really stuck out).
"It's a commitment to VR and to create content that's meaningful to end users," he said.
Whether your phone will run Alcatel's VR content still seems to be up in the air. It'll run on Alcatel phones, of course, with its Google Cardboard-compatible VR headsets, and it'll also run on "traditional, non-Daydream devices," by which I'm pretty sure the company means Cardboard-compatible devices. The company's press release says at least the initial video will also be posted as 360 videos on YouTube. More details will come later this spring, Alcatel says.