Possibly the highlight of my trip down to San Diego for this year’s Comic-Con is not something that I did… but something that I watched someone else do.
Before the convention floor opened for preview night on Wednesday, Shane, Juan, and I traversed over to the Hilton Gaslamp hotel to checkout a media preview of VRCon. We all had an amazing time speaking about the latest VR camera rigs, but the most memorable moments of the offsite event were experiencing VRWerx Paranormal Activity: The Lost Soul.
The Lost Soul is set to launch this Summer for HTC Vive, a little later on for the Oculus Rift, and will even head to consoles with Sony’s Playstation VR headset. The demo that we experiences was about 4-7 minutes long depending on just how you played, but a VRWerx representative said that the full experience should take gamers about 10 hours.
The demo had you traversing through a dimly lit house while the terrors around you begin to unfold. We used the HTC Vive headset to look around the house, and two controllers that acted like hands, which would allow us to grab objects, open doors and cupboards, and try (and fail) to cover our virtual eyes when something in this world terrified us.
The demo was a blast. I jumped a few times, and so did Juan. It was a tense and scary environment, and I sensed some P.T. inspirations as soon as the demo booted up. This is probably the coolest VR experience I’ve had thus far, as instead of simply watching the action unfold and having the opportunity to look around it, you were fully in control, and at the centre of it. It’s incredibly immersive, with some fantastic sound design that simply never lets you calm down.
But like I said, the highlight of this year’s SDCC was not doing something, but watching someone else do something. Shane O’Hare played The Lost Soul first, and while the journalists that played before us all had appropriate, moderate reactions, Shane went completely off the rails to the point where people were leaving other booths to watch and laugh at him. There was a pretty substantial crowd waiting for him when he took the headset off.
But, don’t take my word for it, watch Shane lose it playing Paranormal Activity: The Lost Soul below.
https://youtu.be/vQ_3MtTrQxo