I sit in a wheelchair, my wrists strapped to the armrests, as it rolls down a dark hallway filled with cobwebs. I cringe and sink deep in my seat as the gossamer threads graze my hands. And we’re not even into the scarier parts of this virtual-reality haunted house, tucked away upstairs at Epic Brewery in Denver.
At a regular haunted house, you know costumed actors lurk behind every corner, ready to pop out and scare you. Fake blood, scary masks and darkness are all a given. You follow the crowd, cling to your friends and scream together.
But entering a haunted house powered by virtual reality? It’s worse — or scary-better, depending on your perspective.
Virtual reality gets inside your brain. The technology tricks you into believing that animated horror is really happening. When rising blood-hued water engulfs my head, I have difficulty breathing for a few seconds. The sharp, pointed teeth of a fleshy humanoid creature hovering near my neck makes me want to swat it away. But I can’t. My hands are strapped down.
With virtual reality goggles covering my eyes and headphones on my ears, I’m more immersed in this animated virtual world than any haunted house with friends. You also don’t see VR Haunted House co-founder Justin Moskowitz grinning as he uses finger pokers, netting and other tricks to keep the mind games going. I wasn’t rolling down the hall in the wheelchair, but Moskowitz’s wriggling of the handles made me feel like I was moving.
“A lot of what we’ve done here is bringing virtual reality even more to life with some 4-D effects,” said Moskowitz, co-founder of Clutch Gaming Arena in Arvada.
Moskowitz’s Halloween venture with partner Beatrice Leung is their first, but not the first for Denver. High-tech barber shop Spruce hosted a VR haunted house last year, but after a busy year doesn’t plan to do one this season. Nationwide, larger entertainment venues have expanded into virtual horror, including The Repository at Universal Studios Florida through the end of October. Knott’s Berry Farm in Southern California shut down its “Fear VR: 5150” after being open just a week following insensitivity complaints by mental-health advocates.
The Denver attraction does include a room called “Escape the Mental Hospital” but the patients aren’t human. One has a tail. Two other rooms include fighting the undead in “Zombie Apocalypse” and a thrilling walk on a plank 52 stories in the air in “Don’t Fall.”
A virtual reality experience is a made-up world that only exists when you put on special goggles like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive or Samsung Gear. Turn in any direction and you’re surrounded by a new world, giving creative software developers plenty of room to add horrific details. (Augmented reality, in comparison, is a layer of fiction on top of the real word, like the pocket monsters in Pokemon Go.)
“That was awesome,” customer Claudia Eurioste said after the mental asylum tour. “I will come back and do it again. It played on your fears.”
She screamed. I screamed. I witnessed grown men scream too.
The strange thing about virtual reality is that it’s a cartoon. As the elevator door opened onto the 52nd floor, I knew the virtual plank before me was really just a wood plank about 1 inch off the ground. Yet my feet barely moved. And there was no way I was going to jump.
“Essentially, what VR developers do is add in all sorts of different effects in the programming of the scene to make it feel as real as possible,” Moskowitz said. “When you watch someone falling off the side of a building in a cartoon, you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, that isn’t going to be scary.’ But then you get (the VR goggles) on, you’re like, ‘I don’t want to get out of the elevator.’ It’s a lot of little mind tricks that developers put into each game.”
Moskowitz pointed to cube-like sensors in the room that communicated with the headset and hand controllers so the software knows exactly where a player is standing.
“That is a big part of the realism,” he said. “One of the things early on in virtual reality that they messed up on was people were getting really bad nausea from using it. They found out they had to increase the resolution to 4K.”
Companies like Oculus VR are pushing for 4K resolution and frame rates of at least 90 frames per second. (For context, TV broadcasts are in the range of 24 to 30 frames per second). Simulator sickness is when virtual reality tricks your body too much, causing your body to feel off balance and giving you motion sickness.
While VR gamers may experience nausea, so far no one has thrown up after going through this haunted house, Moskowitz said. That’s probably because the experience lasts about 5 minutes per room.
Augustina King, who drove from Colorado Springs just to experience the VR haunted house, said that some parts were definitely scarier than a regular haunted house. And she should know — she’s a hired zombie for a haunted house in Colorado Springs.
“In a haunted house with people actors, the costuming and makeup is just different,” King said. “To see the 3-D video game look is pretty creepy.”
As unbelievable as a mermaid-like creature with two legs and a tail may be, you either watch in horror or awe as she swims into focus. And as she — it — comes uncomfortably close to you, its mouth morphs into the jaws of a crocodile. You know it’s not real but it seems like the sharpest and most pointed incisors ever — like the type you would draw on a fierce cartoon crocodile. But the closer it swims toward you, the wider its mouth opens and the sharper its teeth grow. Until…
I guess the other difference between a real haunted house and this virtual one is that if you decide VR too scary, you can just shut your eyes and it will all disappear.
