Experience Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” in Virtual Reality: Download the Free App Created by Queen & Google

You don’t just lis­ten to “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody”; you expe­ri­ence it. Any­one who’s ever heard Queen’s sig­na­ture pro­gres­sive rock epic knows it, and any­one who’s ever per­formed all six min­utes of it at a karaoke bar under­stands it more deeply still. The song, which rumor holds to have cost more to record than any sin­gle to date, made use of the lat­est stu­dio tech­niques; now, tech­nol­o­gy bare­ly imag­in­able when the song hit the charts in 1975 has giv­en us a whole new way to expe­ri­ence “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody”: in vir­tu­al real­i­ty, through either the Google Card­board app or as a 360° video.

A col­lab­o­ra­tion between Queen, Google Play, and VR devel­op­er Eno­sis, The Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Expe­ri­ence offers a three-dimen­sion­al audio­vi­su­al jour­ney fea­tur­ing “inter­ac­tive ele­ments and spa­tial sound, allow­ing you to step inside the music.” The Cre­ators Pro­jec­t’s Kara Weisen­stein describes it as “peer­ing into Fred­die Mercury’s brain. The musi­cian was famous­ly coy about the song’s mean­ing, and while it doesn’t give any­thing away, this expe­ri­ence ren­ders Mercury’s imag­i­na­tion in resplen­dent pur­ples and blues. The bal­lad is a play­ful won­der­land of bicy­cling skele­tons and ani­mat­ed globes. Dur­ing the opera, the scene is a spooky cave. The rock sec­tion is a neon trip through space, and the coda is a drip­py, inter­galac­tic auro­ra.”

“ ‘Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’ is unusu­al, isn’t it?” asks Queen’s lead gui­tarist and self-described VR pro­po­nent Bri­an May in the video on the mak­ing of The Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Expe­ri­ence above. “Even 40 years lat­er, or what­ev­er it is, [the 1975 song] still sounds inno­v­a­tive.” And it began inspir­ing inno­va­tion right after its record­ing, when it led to the six-minute film that, years before MTV, prac­ti­cal­ly invent­ed the form of the music video. Does this new project her­ald an era when every sin­gle must, by neces­si­ty, come accom­pa­nied by a full-fledged VR jour­ney? For the moment, that ques­tion remains among the unan­swered, right along­side the one Queen has been ask­ing for over four decades now: “Is this the real life? Is this just fan­ta­sy?”

Enter the The Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Expe­ri­ence here. 

via The Cre­ators Project

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Inside the Rhap­sody: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on the Mak­ing of Queen’s Clas­sic Song, ‘Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’ (2002)

Gui­tarist Bri­an May Explains the Mak­ing of Queen’s Clas­sic Song, ‘Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’

Queen Doc­u­men­tary Pays Trib­ute to the Rock Band That Con­quered the World

The Music of Queen Re-Imag­ined by “Extra­or­di­nary” Clas­si­cal Pianist, Natalia Pos­no­va

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.