Vulnicura VR Remastered For Quest 3 & Apple Vision Pro Is Truly A Mixed Bag

Björk: Vulnicura VR Remastered brings the artist’s immersive album experience to Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro, but it has technical issues, and much of it doesn’t hold up.

All the way back in 2014, filmmaker Andrew Thomas Huang filmed Icelandic singer Björk singing Stonemilker, the opening track of her then-upcoming album Vulnicura, with a 360° camera.

As Björk explained in a recent post on X, since very few people owned a VR headset at home back then – this was the era of Oculus developer kit headsets and the Samsung Gear VR Innovator Edition for the Note 4 – her team started by exhibiting the immersive video at physical venues, including record shops, before uploading the song to YouTube in 2015, just a few months after Google’s platform first added support for 360° video.

The team went on to create a panoramic video for Black Lake, then further 360° videos for Mouth Mantra (which was recorded inside Björk’s mouth!) and Quicksand, which was one of the first major 360° livestreams on YouTube. This range of immersive music videos was exhibited at venues like New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Vivid Sydney.

Following this, the tracks Notget and Family were exhibited as real-time rendered VR experiences at various venues around the world, and in 2019, the full Björk Vulnicura Virtual Reality Album with all of the above was released on Steam for PC VR owners to experience at home, priced at $30.

Since then though, the major shift in VR has been the meteoric rise of standalone headsets, and so Björk contracted PulseJet Studios to “remaster” the experience for Meta Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro headsets.

The remaster includes upscaling and image quality enhancement for the videos, increased fidelity for the menu overworld environment, controller-free hand tracking support, and “enhanced spatial audio”.

Trying it out on Quest 3, I encountered a number of technical issues and found it a mixed bag of rough patches and gems.

Trying to use hand tracking, the select gesture wasn’t recognized most of the time, so I had to pick up controllers. And in the menu overworld environment (a virtual slice of Iceland you navigate to move between songs), the frame rate dropped so low that I could clearly see the black bars indicative of reprojection.

But these were relatively minor issues compared to the download experience. Despite being a multi-gigabyte install, the actual video content is not bundled with the app. I arrived at the first song and clicked it, the screen started to fade as if it was going to play, and then the fade reverted, and a placeholder-looking “Downloading content…” prompt appeared in my view for several minutes. There was no exact download progress readout, and no time estimate. Just a blurry progress bar and a ‘Got It’ button. And while the Iceland VR environment is upgraded from the 2019 release, it’s still relatively low quality – nowhere near nice enough to enjoy sitting there.

The video content should really just be part of the original app download, or at the very least the first track should be! I’d far rather wait longer in my VR or passthrough home than in this low-detail virtual Iceland.

Once you get past the technical issues and ugly download bar, the actual content within Björk: Vulnicura VR Remastered ranges from breathtaking, to underwhelming, to downright bizarre.

While the upscaling has improved them somewhat, the 360° videos were filmed on a 4K monoscopic camera a decade ago, and don’t deliver anywhere near the sharpness of today’s 8K 360° cameras, nor the sense of presence of 3D. And whatever Mouth Mantra is trying to say—the track filmed inside Björk’s mouth (yes, really)—the point doesn’t come across with the low resolution and distortion.

The two real-time rendered VR tracks are the highlight here, with sharp hypnotic visuals and spectacular lighting that feel like a novel middle ground between a music video and live concert performance. They’re so good that I wish Björk would release them together as a separate, streamlined experience, or consider trying to port them to VRChat.

Björk: Vulnicura VR Remastered is $35 on the Meta Horizon Store for Quest 3 and Quest 3S, and $45 on the App Store for Apple Vision Pro headsets.

If you’re a huge Björk fan, grabbing this experience is a no brainer. But if you’re not, make sure you know exactly what you’re getting before dropping $40 on Vulnicura VR Remastered.