http://www.usatoday.com/life/televis...7-xquest_x.htm
With 'Xquest,' reality TV hits final frontier
By Gary Levin, USA TODAY
LOS ANGELES — Apollo 13 meets Star Wars in an ambitious reality-TV project designed to mimic outer-space travel.
Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, the self-professed space fanatics behind Apollo 13 and the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, are producing Xquest, a series expected next summer that Fox will unveil to TV critics today.
Contestants won't actually blast off: Instead, two teams of seven to 10 will occupy specially constructed NASA simulators called biocrafts for 30 days at an undisclosed location and be filmed with hidden cameras.
Both the travelers and viewers will be transported to space virtual-reality style, thanks to high-tech graphics and the help of co-producer Alex Seropian, a creator of the popular Halo game.
With Apollo 13, Grazer says, moviegoers "knew the beginning, they know how it ended, but they couldn't help but want to put themselves inside the capsule (and) with those three guys in outer space. Now we have a show that enables you to do that with even greater uncertainty, and to me that adds up to something that might be captivating."
Producers are mum about the mechanics of the show, but say the faux space travelers will eat, sleep and live, astronaut-style, in the controlled environment. They'll have occasional excursions outside the bedroom-sized capsule and will find themselves part of a carefully constructed space mystery.
Monitored by medics and psychologists, they'll be assigned tasks such as navigating through an asteroid hurtling toward them and "visiting" planets, a la Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Although the crafts won't be gravity-free most of the time, "we're trying to be as true to the experience of actual space (travel) as possible," says David Nevins, who heads Howard and Grazer's Imagine Television (24, Arrested Development).
"We're going to push people to extremes of endurance — heat, cold, claustrophobia, psychological distress," he says. "We're creating a completely immersive environment. It's very Apollo 13, and it's going to be very real."
New Fox entertainment chief Peter Liguori, moving away from Fox's tackier reality fare, says the genre needs "an audacious swing at the plate. The idea of marrying the best of reality TV with video games and science is something that makes good sense."
Hewing to conventions of such shows, the space travelers will be assigned "demanding tasks with minimal training," says Nevins, which will lead to the gradual elimination of weaker players until a winner — more likely, a smaller team — is left to claim an unspecified prize.
Because the show is still in the early stages of development, producers haven't determined eligibility requirements for contestants and won't begin auditions for several months.
This isn't the first time reality TV has dabbled in space: Survivor producer Mark Burnett planned to rocket one contestant to Russia's Mir space station as the prize for an NBC series that focused on a training competition. But much like Mir, the project disintegrated four years ago.
This article doesn't go into all of the details, but from what I've heard, the outside world in Xquest will be created with a custom video game engine and the crew will have to interact and fight with outside crafts being controlled by other people. I've also been told that it will be tied to some sort of online game where people will be able to actually interact with the XQUEST ship from home. Not sure how that would work, but it's a fascinating idea.
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