What’s new on Amazon Video for April 2018

No April Fools’ crap here — just great shows!

Can you believe we’re almost a quarter of the way through 2018 already? It’s closing in on us real fast. And that means it’s time to update what’s new on Amazon Video for April 2018.

There are a bunch of movies from the 1980s and ’90s that you’re not going to want to miss. Like thrillers? Basic Instinct and Internal Affairs are both on tap. I’m still partial to The Dogs of War (it was a great book, too), and if you haven’t seen Mystic River, well. …

The point is, there’s a ton of great movies coming up in April on Amazon Video. And scroll on down to see what’s still to come in the rest of March!

Amazon Prime Video has is one of the go-to destinations for on-demand content, thanks in no small part to devices like the $50 Amazon Fire Stick, the all-new $70 Amazon Fire TV, and even the $229 Amazon Echo Show.

But hardware is the easy part. Buy it once, and then use the heck out of it. What’s not quite so easy is keeping up with everything that’s new on Amazon Prime Video — because new shows are always coming and going.

Here’s what’s new on Amazon Prime Video in April 2018!

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Coming April 1

• 30 Beats (2012)
• 52 Pick-Up (1986)
• A Simple Plan (1998)
• A Suitable Girl (2017)
• Basic Instinct (1992)
• Brooklyn’s Finest (2009)
• Carrie (1976)
• Danny Roane: First Time Director (2007)
• Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)
• Drugstore Cowboy (1989)
• Escape from New York (1981)
• Eye for An Eye (1996)
• Flashback (1990)
• For a Few Dollars More (1967)
• Fred 3: Camp Fred (2012)
• Fred: Night of the Living Fred (2011)
  + Fred: The Movie (2010)
• Friday the 13th (1980)
• Funny About Love (1990)
• Gamer (2009)
• Hangman (2017)
• Hellbenders 3D (2012)
• Hitler’s Bodyguard (Season 1)
• Ice Mother (2017)
• Internal Affairs (1990)
• Kickboxer (1989)
• Ladybugs (1992)
• Life Stinks (1991)
• Man in the Moon (1991)
• Marathon Man (1976)
• Married to the Mob (1988)
• Meatballs (1979)
• Merlin (Seasons 1-5)
• Miami Blues (1990)
• My Art (2016)
• Mystery Team (2009)
• Mystic River (2003)
• Paranormal Activity (2007)
• Philadelphia (1993)
• Prancer (1989)
• Project Nim (2011)
• Quigley Down Under (1990)
• Red State (2012)
• Salsa (1988)
• Shanghai Surprise (1986)
• She’s Having a Baby (1988)
• Sleepers (1996)
• Small Soldiers (1998)
• Snake Eyes (1998)
• Spaceballs (1987)
• Stand Up Guys (2012)
• Standing in the Shadows of Motown (2002)
• Steel Magnolias (1989)
• Storage Wars Northern Treasures (Season 1)
• Superstar (1999)
• Tenderness (2009)
• Texas Chainsaw Massacre II (1986)
• The Big Wedding (2013)
• The Conspirator (2011)
• The Departure (2017)
• The Dogs of War (1981)
• The Foot Fist Way (2008)
• The Karate Kid (1984)
• The King of Comedy (1982)
• The Marc Pease Experience (2009)
• The Phantom (1996)
• The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999)
• The Replacements (2000)
• The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)
• The Winning Season (2010)
• Thirst Street (2017)
• Throw Momma from the Train (1987)
• Trading Mom (1994)
• Troy (2004)
• Up in Smoke (1978)
• Uptown Girls (2003)
• Warpath (1951)
• Wayne’s World 2 (1993)
• Wishmaster (1997)
• Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies (1999)
• Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell (2001)
• Wishmaster 4: The Prophecy Fulfilled (2002)
• World’s Craziest Foods (Season 1)

Coming April 2

• Chavela (2017)
• Psychopaths (2017)
• The Missing (Season 2)

Coming April 5

• The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

Coming April 6

• Blame (2017)
• The Florida Project (2017)

Coming April 10

• Hours (2013)

Coming April 12

• I Can Do Bad All by Myself (2009)
• Saturday Church (2017)

Coming April 13

• Bosch (Prime Original, Season 4)

Coming April 15

• Fame (2009)

Coming April 18

• Aida’s Secrets (2016)

Coming April 23

• Red Rock (Season 3)

Coming April 24

• Vikings (Season 5)

Coming April 25

• The Vanishing of Sidney Hall (2017)

Coming April 27

• All or Nothing: Dallas Cowboys (Season 3)
• Little Big Awesome (Prime Original, Season 1A)

Previously, on Amazon video …

Here’s what was (or still is, depending on when you’re reading this) new on Amazon Video in February:

Coming March 1

• 1984 (1985)
• A Feast at Midnight (1997)
• A Guy Thing (2003)
• A View to a Kill (1985)
• Amelie (2001)
• Antitrust (2001)
• Bad Influence (1990)
• Bad News Bears (2005)
• Billy the Kid (2013)
• Body of Evidence (1993)
• Breakdown (1997)
• Bye Bye Birdie (1995)
• Captivity (2007)
• Carriers (2009)
• Chaplin (1992)
• Criminal Law (1989)
• Dance Academy: The Comeback (Purchase only, 2017)
• Die Another Day (2002)
• Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988)
• Dreamkeeper (2003)
• Earth Girls Are Easy (1988)
• F/X (1986)
• F/X 2 (1991)
• Fatal Instinct (1993)
• Finder’s Fee (2003)
• Fire with Fire (2012)
• Fluke (1995)
• For Your Eyes Only (1981)
• Forces of Nature (1999)
• Goldeneye (1995)
• Hackers (1995)
• Hanoi Hilton (1987)
• Hart’s War (2002)
• Home of the Brave (2006)
• Human Trafficking (Season 1)
• I’m Gonna Git You Sucka (1988)
• Imagine That (2009)
• Jeff Who Lives at Home (2012)
• Jennifer 8 (1992)
• Kingpin (1996)
• License to Kill (1989)
• Little Ghost (1997)
• Moonraker (1979)
• Mr. Majestyk (1974)
• National Lampoon’s Dirty Movie (2011)
• National Lampoon’s Dorm Daze 2: College @ Sea (2006)
• On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)
• Regarding Henry (1991)
• Southie (1998)
• Sprung (1997)
• The Accused (1988)
• The Color of Magic (Season 1)
• The Devil Inside (2012)
• The Doors (1991)
• The Infinite World of H.G. Wells (Season 1)
• The Living Daylights (1987)
• The Million Dollar Hotel (2001)
• The Music Never Stopped (2011)
• The Secret of N.I.M.H. (1982)
• The World is Not Enough (1999)
• Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
• Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)
• XXX (2002)
• XXX: State of the Union (2005)
• Young Adults (2011)
• Zathura: A Space Adventure (2005)

Coming March 2

• Brad’s Status (Prime Original, 2017)
• Dance Academy: The Comeback (2017)

Coming March 3

• The Nut Job 2 (2017)

Coming March 6

• Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)

Coming March 8

• Aftermath (2017)

Coming March 9

• Power Rangers (2017)
• Sneaky Pete (Prime Original, Season 2)
• The Remix (Prime Original, Season 1)
• The Tunnel (Season 2)

Coming March 10

• November Criminals (2017)

Coming March 14

• Tommy’s Honour (2017)

Coming March 15

• LOL (2012)

Coming March 17

• Crooked House (2017)

Coming March 20

• Father Figures (2017)
• Insidious: The Last Key (2018)
• The Greatest Showman (2017)

Coming March 26

• Let There Be Light (2017)
• The Durrells in Corfu (Season 2)

Coming March 27

• All the Money in the World (2017)
• The Little Hours (2017)

Coming March 30

• The Dangerous Book for Boys (Amazon Orignial)

Coming March 31

• A Suitable Girl (2017)
• Bitter Harvest (2017)
• Flames (2017)
• Ice Mother (2017)
• Imperium (2016)
• The Blue Lagoon (1980)
• The Departure (2017)
• Thirst Street (2017)

Updated March 14, 2018: April’s listings are in!

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Netflix won’t reward kids with ‘patches’ for watching TV

Last week, reports surfaced that Netflix was testing a sort of rewards program wherein children could earn “patches” for watching shows like A Series of Unfortunate Events and Fuller House. While the patches didn’t come with any additional benefits and didn’t unlock new content, some expressed concern that it would encourage children to watch too much TV. The feature was just a test with no guarantee of a full launch, but Netflix has now told us that the feature won’t be seeing a wide release. A spokesperson for the company told us today, “We’ve concluded the test for patches and have decided not to move forward with the feature for kids. We test lots of things at Netflix in order to learn what works well — and what doesn’t work well — for our members.”

The patches test came out as Facebook was facing heated criticism for its Messenger Kids app. Advocacy groups have asked the company to pull the app because of its encouragement of more screen time and social media engagement.

Facebook knows it must do more to fight bad actors

Not everything at SXSW 2018 was about films or gadgets. A few blocks away from the Austin Convention Center, where the event is being held, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) hosted a number of panels for its Innovation Policy Day. In a session dubbed “Fighting Terror with Tech,” Facebook’s Lead Policy Manager of Counterterrorism, Brian Fishman, spoke at great length about what the company is doing to keep bad actors away from its platform. That doesn’t only include terrorists who may be using the site to communicate, or to try to radicalize others, but also trolls, bots and the spreading of hate speech and fake news.

It’s no secret that Facebook (along with other social media giants) are under the microscope of governments all around the world, as their platforms continue to be used to promote hateful, abusive and dividing content. Fishman said that while Facebook is now being more transparent about these issues, and also creating tools to counter terrorism, harassment, trolls and bots with AI and human sleuths, the company still needs to do more.

“As good as algorithms can be at surfacing potentially dangerous content, there’s a lot of nuance here,” Fishman said. “One of the risks is that we want to be very aggressive at taking down content, but we want to protect the ability of our users to speak about controversial issues, to speak sometimes in contentious ways, and so to make some of those nuanced calls you really need human beings.”

Facebook Lead Policy Manager of Counterterrorism, Brian Fishman (second from left to right), speaks at SXSW 2018.

The effort to have actual people, not just automated systems, monitoring and reviewing for any potentially abusive content is key to Facebook and others like Twitter and YouTube, especially as their algorithms have proven to be flawed. That’s one of the reasons governments are calling for these sites to be more closely regulated. Last year, Germany introduced a law that will impose hefty fines on social media platforms, including of course Facebook, if they fail to remove harmful content such as hate speech in under 24 hours.

Many like London Mayor Sadiq Khan fear that government regulation on companies like Facebook is a bad path to go down on, as it could hinder innovation. But, he said during a keynote at SXSW, that they also can’t be above the law and that with the resources and skills they have, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube should be doing more to tackle these issues. “We have to do a better job to reassure users and governments,” Fishman said “and that’s something that I’m thinking about and working on.”

Catch up on the latest news from SXSW 2018 right here.

Anyone can make Facebook Instant Games

Facebook’s Instant Games technology hasn’t exactly taken off (there are less than 200 games to date), but that’s because it’s been in closed testing. Now, it might have a chance to grow: Facebook has opened the Instant Games platform to all developers. Anyone can build HTML5-based web games designed to run in Messenger or your News Feed, whether you’re on desktop or mobile. They’ll have ways of making money from and promoting games, too, including ads (sorry, folks) and cross-promotional links.

Creators don’t have to start from scratch: Facebook already has a number of recommended game engines to use with the platform.

Games have clearly been a mainstay of Facebook for a long while. The Instant Games tech is really a logical extension of the social network’s strategy. It makes games (and importantly for Facebook, the ads that run alongside them) available in more places, and eliminates the long load times you sometimes see with more conventional games. No, this isn’t likely to upend the conventional game market, but it could make gaming decidedly more accessible.

Source: Facebook for Developers

SteamVR’s auto resolution knows what your GPU can handle

Valve updated SteamVR today with a new feature that automatically adjusts your headset’s resolution up to what your GPU can optimally render. This should function like autofocus, taking the decision-making out of the user’s hands and reassuring developers that their content is being enjoyed at the best resolution. But it could also make VR more accessible, since it also auto-selects settings on lower-performing GPUs, letting experiences run more smoothly on more affordable machines.

Whether boosting or lowering resolution, the process is simple, according to Steam’s blog post: SteamVR runtime measures your GPU’s speed and instructs applications to render at a resolution appropriate to its power. For users with graphics chips that can’t render their headset’s native resolution, SteamVR will down-res it (but not lower than the Vive or Rift’s native resolution).

It’s good to see SteamVR moving past adding digital tchotchkes to improving features, like adding support for Windows Mixed Reality headsets and a YouTube 360 video app. The new autoresolution is live in beta, so you’ll have to opt in (find SteamVR under Tools in the Steam Library and right-click to find ‘beta’ in properties).

Via: Road To VR

Source: Steam

Pedometer++ Developer Shares Data on Apple Watch Adoption Rates Across All Models

David Smith, the developer behind the popular Pedometer++ app for iPhone and Apple Watch, today shared some interesting user data that offers insight into Apple Watch adoption rates, and specifically, how quickly he’s seen Apple Watch Series 3 adoption grow.

Smith looked at data collected from August 1, 2017 (a month before the debut of the Apple Watch Series 3) to March 14, 2018. During that time, he’s seen rapid growth in the number of active Pedometer++ users who have an Apple Watch Series 3, and a steady decline in users who have an Apple Watch Series 0 or an Apple Watch Series 2, both of which are now discontinued.

Just under 35 percent of Pedometer++ users now have an Apple Watch Series 3, while around 24 percent have an Apple Watch Series 0, down from more than 40 percent in August of 2017.

According to Smith, he’s been keeping a close eye on Apple Watch Series 0 usage rates because he’s hoping that Apple will soon drop support for the original Apple Watch, which he describes as a “bit painful” to develop for.

It is just slow and honestly a bit painful to develop for. Even basic things like deploying your application to the watch can take uncomfortably long amounts of time. In daily use the Series 0 is probably “good enough” for many customers, especially with the speed/stability improvements added in watchOS 4, but as a developer I can’t wait until I no longer have to support it.

By contrast, Smith says the new Apple Watch Series 3 is “a delight to work with” because it’s fast, capable, and has LTE functionality that allows for new kinds applications. Smith is hoping watchOS 5 will drop support for the original Apple Watch, which is why he tracks falling Series 0 usage rates, but he does admit that the device is still adequate for many users who just need basic functionality.

When watchOS 5 launches, presumably this September, the original Apple Watch will be more than three years old, and Smith believes, that based on current trends, Series 0 usage could be as low as 15 to 20 percent in his Pedometer++ app, which presumably is reflective of overall usage rates.

For comparison’s sake, Apple ended support for the original iPhone, released in 2007, in 2010 when the fourth-generation version of iOS was released. Support for the first-generation iPod touch, also released in 2007, ended with the same operating system update.

Apple ended support for the first-generation iPad, released in 2010, with the launch of iOS 6 in 2013.

Apple clearly has a history of ending support for first-generation devices after a few years, but it’s not yet clear if the company will do the same for the original Apple Watch. Some of the original Apple Watch models, which were offered in 18-Karat gold, were priced at up to $17,000, so Apple could have unhappy customers when support for the device eventually ends.

For more of Smith’s Apple Watch adoption analysis, make sure to check out his full blog post.

Related Roundups: Apple Watch, watchOS 4Buyer’s Guide: Apple Watch (Neutral)
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Apple Adds New ‘Families’ Section to its Website With Tips for Parents

In the wake of urging from investors to do more about smartphone addiction among children, Apple has added a new “Families” section to its website that outlines parental control tools and information that parents should be aware of.

The mini site is broken into several sections that highlight a range of kid-friendly features that Apple has put into place like app recommendations, in-app purchase controls, restrictions on apps that can be downloaded, internet limiting tools, Find My Friends, and more.

Apple highlights the Kids section of the App Store, for example, which the company says parents can use to find carefully curated content that’s appropriate for children. The site provides links to tutorials for enabling Ask to Buy so parents can approve app downloads, and it lets parents know how to turn on restrictions to limit in-app purchases and which websites are available to children.

Another section of the site points out tools like Find My Friends for keeping track of a child’s location, and recommends setting up group chat for the whole family in Messages.

Apple also provides details on Family Sharing, which is designed to let members of the same family share apps, music, books, iCloud storage, and more, and there’s a section on tips for the whole family, with feature recommendations like Do Not Disturb While Driving, Bedtime, Medical ID, Night Shift, and Emergency SOS.

Apple also recommends products like the Apple Watch with LTE connectivity to “reach kids in an emergency” and to help the whole family stay fit, and there’s a dedicated section on privacy controls. Parents who have children that use iOS devices will likely want to give the new site a look.

Apple has promised to introduce more robust parental control tools, and rumors have suggested the company will introduce the features in iOS 12. Apple is said to be planning to debut a Digital Health tool that will let parents know how much time their children have spent using iOS devices.
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What we saw at SXSW Interactive

It’s not every day you get to see Elon Musk, his brother and Westworld co-creator Jonathan Nolan host a sing-along in front of a sold-out audience at the Moody Theater, but this week, we did. SXSW Interactive is coming to a close, so we’re packing up and looking back at all the wild things we experienced, saw and ate.

While in Austin, we checked out the Bose AR glasses that overlay audio on the real world, the build-a-vibrator workshop hosted by Crave, a rousing speech by London Mayor Sadiq Khan, Ready Player One’s suite of VR games, HBO’s Westworld in real life, Samsung’s adorable AI assistants, and much, much more. And that’s not even mentioning all the barbecue.

Catch up on the latest news from SXSW 2018 right here.

Watching ‘Annihilation’ at home versus the cinema

Alex Garland wrote 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Dredd, establishing his bona fides as a master of blending horror and mind-bending sci-fi. He then wrote and directed Ex Machina, which propelled him into an elite fraternity of directors producing smart, arty films that stick with you long after you leave the theater. His latest film, Annihilation, was set to be his big mainstream breakthrough, but it will be released theatrically only in the US, Canada and China. In the rest of the world, the film will play on Netflix. Does that mean everyone in the rest of the world is losing out by having to watch it in the comfort of their own homes? We asked two of our editors — one in New York and one in London — to report their respective experiences.

Devindra Hardawar
US: AMC Village 7 Cinema

After seeing Annihilation in a packed New York City theater on opening night, I had two thoughts. I was grateful to experience such a gorgeous, transcendent film with a group of strangers, on a giant screen that demanded our attention. And I felt sorry for audiences outside of the US, Canada and China who won’t have the opportunity to experience it in theaters. If this is the future of film distribution, I fear that we’re losing something essential.

As someone who deeply admired Alex Garland’s Ex Machina and Jeff VanderMeer’s original novel Annihilation, my expectations were high for the movie. But I was a bit worried when Paramount announced its unusual split distribution strategy. Not so much because I feared it meant the film was bad; rather, it seemed as if the studio was just dumping it to make some quick cash, instead of doing the work to get people into theaters. I suppose that’s understandable for Paramount, though, following a string of box office failures and a rough few years of earnings. Ex Machina also suffered at the box office internationally, making a mere $11.4 million (on top of its $25.4 million domestic gross). A Netflix deal would certainly fetch more for Paramount, and, of course, it would give even more people access to the film.

I’m sure I’ll enjoy watching Annihilation at home, but I’m also a movie nerd with a projector and an extensive surround sound setup. If you’re just watching it on a TV or — movie gods forbid — on your laptop or tablet, you’ll definitely miss out on the film’s epic scope and rich sound design. Several sequences seemed purposefully built to be experienced with a crowd on an enormous screen. A scene with a monster prowling through a room, as our intrepid explorers can only sit trembling, praying not to get attacked, had my audience holding their breath. (I could tell from the collective sigh of relief when it was all over.) The film’s astounding finale, a dialogue-free visual feast that would be right at home at the Museum of Modern Art, felt almost like a collective religious experience.

Perhaps that’s the best way to put it. Seeing a film in a theater, especially a film as masterful as Annihilation, is a bit like going to church. It soothes my soul, and I feel even more at ease when I’m with an audience that’s seeing the light. At home on my couch, it’s like trying to find enlightenment from a televangelist.

Daniel Cooper
UK: PS4 running Netflix on a 40-inch Blaupunkt HDTV, optical out to a Sony HT-CT80

Seeing Annihilation for the first time on the small screen left me with the sense that I’d missed something from the whole experience. It’s the first time I’ve been denied the opportunity to watch an Alex Garland movie in a cinema, which is how I’d experienced all of his work thus far, from 28 Days Later onward.

Whether he’s writing or directing, Garland’s work resonates with a paranoid, woozy energy that amplifies the skin-tearing tension. But, as slow and tense as Annihilation is, it’s hard to be as gripped in your living room as you are in a cinema.

If you want to get pedantic about it, there’s a film theory term — scopophilia — which denotes the pleasure you get from watching something. And in a big, darkened room full of similarly awestruck viewers, you’re more drawn into the world unfolding in front of you.

And Annihilation has one hell of a world, full of weird, off-kilter visuals that mix the joy of nature with extreme body horror. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the film has — as Devindra says above — an “epic scope and rich sound design.”

On a TV screen, the Floridian visuals aren’t too broad or deep, but claustrophobic and tight, and in my notes I wrote that the film “isn’t cinematic.” It didn’t look like a $40 million movie, but perhaps that’s because the TV sapped all of those lush visuals and made it look more pedestrian.

That said, a lot of the film is composed of medium-frame shots, and you’ll be spending a lot of time looking at Natalie Portman staring out beyond the frame. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but if you’d told me this was a TV movie on a quarter of the budget, I would have believed you.

And that’s something that affected Garland’s last movie, too, since Ex Machina was essentially a series of scenes in which two people talk in a room. It’s an impeccable movie, but one that just as easily could have been a theatrical production rather than a cinematic one.

It’s the same with the sound design, which I’m sure was much more terror-inducing in a cinema than being pumped out my admittedly piddly soundbar. In the future, I’d love to get a beefier setup, but then, it’s not as if — in a town house with a toddler — I’d ever get the opportunity to use it.

The behind-the-scenes saga of why Annihilation came to be on Netflix is a fascinating one, especially since Paramount is now using Netflix as a dumping ground. This and The Cloverfield Paradox were both medium-budget sci-fi movies that the accountants were nervous about releasing.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Paramount’s David Ellison felt that Annihilation, a mid-budget, cerebral, arty sci-fi movie, would alienate audiences. Which is doubly interesting, given that Paramount did quite well with Arrival, a mid-budget, cerebral, arty sci-fi movie that it released in 2016.

I should add that Annihilation is as brilliant as Ex Machina, even if it lacks that movie’s exploration of such a stone-cold sci-fi premise. It’s also one of a small handful of thought-provoking films that seem to have “tentpole classic of the genre” nailed on them from the moment they’re released.

Image: Peter Mountain (Alligator)

National Geographic built ‘Space Projection Helmets’ for its new show

When it came time for National Geographic to build an immersive experience for its new show, One Strange Rock, the network didn’t want another virtual reality experience. So it worked together with McCann and New York City-based Tomorrow Lab to build something entirely new: Space Projection Helmets. From the outside, they look like replica NASA gear — fitting since One Strange Rock is focused on astronauts and their view of Earth. On the inside, though, they have all of the equipment necessary for a personal theatrical experience. You can think of the helmets as mini OMNIMAX cinemas, the dome version of IMAX screens typically found in science museums.

Putting one on is almost like gearing up for space, at least based on my demo at a media event in New York. A helper first placed a harness assembly over my head, which includes shoulder pads to balance it. I was then led into a theater, where another worker carefully placed the helmet over my head and locked it into the harness. After that, I slid down the visor and prepared to launch into virtual space.

Wearing the Space Projection Helmet is a strange experience at first — you’ve got the freedom to move your head around, just like a real astronaut. But it felt more claustrophobic than wearing a VR headset, since your head is literally trapped in a tiny space. Each helmet features a tiny 720p laser projector paired together with a fisheye lens. Together, they shoot a properly proportional image onto the curved visor. That surface is also transmissive, allowing anyone to see exactly what you’re seeing in the helmet. As for audio, that’s handled by a speaker built into the harness.

Eduardo Munoz for National Geographic

Having seen plenty of weird projector contraptions, I didn’t expect much from the Space Projection Helmets at first. But as I saw an image of Earth slowly appearing on a dark horizon, I started to see the appeal. It’s not like VR, which sometimes feels as if you’re looking through a pair of binoculars. It’s a more natural way too render images, and it accomplishes precisely what National Geographic set out to do: Giving us a look at our planet from an astronaut’s perspective. The demo reel only lasted a few minutes, but it highlighted some choice moments from One Strange Rock, like huge volcanic explosions and tumultuous thunderstorms.

Astronaut Chris Hadfield tries on one of the helmets.

Eduardo Munoz for National Geographic

While I still prefer the sheer immersion of a proper VR headset, especially now that they’re reaching higher resolutions, the Space Projection Helmets are an intriguing experiment. National Geographic plans to bring them to schools and planetariums this Spring. They’re an ideal way to promote One Strange Rock, which is shaping up to be the network’s biggest show yet. Narrated by Will Smith, and produced by Darren Aronofsky, it’s an epic look at what makes our planet special, told by the few people who’ve seen it from space. We’ll have more coverage on the show ahead of its premiere on March 26th at 10 PM Eastern.