Now this right here is pure nerd catnip. Produced by the Roddenberry Archive — which “seeks to honor the work and career of Gene Roddenberry by documenting, preserving, and presenting key aspects of his work” — and graphics software developer OTOY, this video chronicles the evolution of the USS Enterprise over the decades and specifically, the Enterprise bridge.
All of the ship’s most famous iterations are covered, like the Enterprise-D from The Next Generation, as well as some lesser known variants like the Enterprise from the canceled Star Trek: Phase II series and the far-future Enterprise-J. They’re all rendered in exquisite detail with OTOY’s cutting edge software. And the narration by John de Lancie, who portrayed the omnipotent prankster Q? Well, that’s just the icing on the cake.
I love this sort of highly detailed nerdery, and I hope these videos expand to cover other areas of the Enterprise, like Main Engineering and Sickbay. You want to justify VR technology to me? Give me some goggles and let me spend a few hours wandering through the passages of the Enterprise-D. (A few years back, a dedicated fan set out to recreate the entire Enterprise-D in VR using Unreal Engine. It was pretty awesome. Until CBS’ lawyers shut it down, that is.)