The presentation utilizes film captured aboard the International Space Station, with a special camera built to capture everything in a full 360° panorama. Hundreds of hours of footage has been curated and built into an immersive VR experience. You put on a set of VR goggles and walk out into a large space where you can tour a wireframe model of the ISS itself. You can look down and see the Earth below (or not, if you're prone to vertigo), and move through the environment and get a sense of just what size the station actually is.
Sprinkled throughout the VR setting are dozens of hovering orbs. Walk up to any of them, "touch" them, and the environment fades. You then get to see a minute-or-so clip of full-resolution footage captured aboard the ISS. It might show someone repairing some device aboard, suiting up for a spacewalk, or just having fun during downtime. You get enough time to experience about a dozen of these clips -- and you could easily go back and do it all again, since there are far more clips than you'll have time to see in one visit.
The entire experience concludes with you being directed to a chair, where a series of chosen clips is presented that were taken outside the station. Seated safely, you see all around the outside of the station, watch the Earth whiz by below, and generally become fully awed with the scope of it all. Like I said, if you're interested in crewed space flight, this experience is great.
Well.... "good," maybe. Only good because you do have to share it with other people. Perhaps 40 or 50 people are allowed in the space at one time; whatever the number, it feels like about 25% too many. You are able to navigate safely enough with the VR goggles: any people you attended the exhibit with show up as yellow "human-shaped" avatars in the wireframe, while any other people show up blue. To me, anyway, it seemed simple enough to avoid running into anybody else.
It apparently was not so simple for the rest of the audience. It's not that anyone full-on ran into me during the experience. But if you're in the middle of watching one of the full video clips, and someone approaches close enough to you that it might be an issue, the clip gets cut off immediately in favor of the wire frame, to let you know the person is there. You can't restart the clip again; you simply have to move on to something else. Three times during my 20-30 minute experience, something interesting was interrupted when someone else "invaded my personal space." There are simply too many people allowed in at one time.
So -- if you're going to go (and again, I think space flight fans will really want to), you might try for a time that may be less crowded. First thing in the morning, if you must go on a weekend? Mid-day during the week, if you have the option? Also be aware that while you can buy a ticket ahead of time with a prescribed time on it, that time is really just when you're able to get in line for the experience. If you're there with any kind of crowd, you'll be waiting a while before you actually get to walk the ISS for yourself.
And yet... still probably worth it. If you live in Denver (or if this exhibit comes to your city next), you may want to look into it.
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