Experience ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ in a 360-degree first-person video from ILMxLab

Lucasfilm’s special-effects department is working on a new frontier of immersive entertainment, and you can get a taste of that on Facebook.

This morning, the Star Wars account on Facebook launched the Star Wars: The Force Awakens Immersive 360 Experience. This is a new kind of video on the social-media website that enables viewers to point a camera around a environment to see a recording in every possible direction. Industrial Light & Magic — the special-effects skunkworks that George Lucas founded to help film the original Star Wars — founded a new division called ILMxLab earlier this year to build this kind of content, and it’s already delivering. While this is part of Facebook’s introduction of 360-degree video, ILMxLab is one of the few companies prepared to take advantage of this technology and to build on for other projects.