I haven’t laughed so hard in a long time. Laughing so hard that tears streamed down my face, possibly filling up the visor attached to my helmet. The helmet was part of a full-body VR experience at the new Netflix House located in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. The Netflix hosts promised that by wearing the helmet, visor, headset, vest, and spiky attachments to both hands and feet, I would feel immersed in a VR experience about the Netflix series Stranger Things.
The host delivered: the experience was truly strange. What got me laughing was the beginning of the experience when the VR software dismembered one of us. We watched as she went sideways, her arms and legs separating from her torso, as she floated up into the air, recombining and becoming something both terrifying and amusing. The Netflix host quickly reset the system and she returned to her normal state, but this surreal, out-of-body experience reminded me that the developers of these new AR/VR experiences have a ways to go.
When the experience restarted, we all moved in a Stranger Things world, with Mind Flayers and Vecnas attacking us for what seemed like forever. We used our hands to fend them off, dodging and dipping to avoid being killed. Having never been a video game player, this experience felt like what I imagined a classic video game would be.
So are video games a classic experience design format?
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