Virgin Galactic — Rafe Johnson

Seymourpowell brought me on to help design the Virgin Galactic spaceship — a VR and AR experience showcasing the cabin and the flight. I built the VR side: modelling the ship, camera animation, rendering, and the immersive digital twin the design team worked inside.

Process

The team kept a constantly-evolving digital twin in a bespoke VR platform, so people across locations could visualise colours, materials, and finishes and make decisions without physical access to the prototype. When the pandemic hit, that let us pivot the reveal from a physical event to a virtual one — plus a VIP experience for Meta Quest and a public AR app on iOS and Android.

The craft challenge was pulling a premium look from the Quest 1’s limits on a short deadline: heavy light-baking through Maya and V-Ray, and custom shaders to blend textures as the cabin changed.

Fig. 01 — Flight footage

Virgin Galactic spaceship cabin — rows of seats beneath round windows looking down on Earth — Fig. 02 — Spaceship cabin

Cabin seat and window detail, Earth visible through the porthole — Fig. 03 — Seat & window detail

A passenger floating in zero gravity inside the Virgin Galactic cabin during spaceflight — Fig. 04 — Zero-g, first spaceflight

The VirginGalacticAR app across three phones — welcome screen, cabin tour, and spaceship model — Fig. 05 — VirginGalacticAR app

Animated AR breakdown of the cabin seat, with floating hands and holographic heads — Fig. 06 — Seat, explored in AR

The cabin seat placed into a real room through the AR app on a phone — Fig. 07 — Placed in your space