We are still in the early baby stages of consumer VR. Most people haven’t tried it, a lot still haven’t even really heard about it, but even those that have a Rift, Vive, or Gear VR in their homes right now are searching for something to keep them coming back every single day. Applications like BigScreen allow you to utilize your entire PC in VR, which is great, and games like Farlands release daily updates to keep things fresh. But what about other daily things that anyone could participate in for a few minutes each day?
If the first thing that comes to your mind isn’t visiting a VR fortune teller, you’re not alone, but it makes a lot of sense. We’ve all been there: walking around a carnival, or fair, or some other event that has a small booth with someone reading palms, or tarot cards, or even gazing into a crystal ball or putting some quarters in one of those mechanical fortune telling machines. Millions of people check their daily horoscopes and crack open fortune cookies as well. There’s something novel and exhilarating about the prospect of getting a peek into your future before it happens – whether you believe in that sort of thing or not. That’s where Kismet, a new VR fortune telling experience, comes in.
“I’ve been obsessed with mechanical fortune telling machines ever since I was a child,” says David Chontos, Writer and Director at Psyop. “Virtual reality has given me a platform to not only create one of those machines entirely from my own imagination, but to step inside of it, and to invite the rest of the world inside with me.”
The problem is that there’s a major lack of access for most people. Off the top of my head I have no idea where the closest fortune teller or tarot card reader is in relation to my apartment. But with Kismet, that sort of service would just be a few short feet away inside of my VR headset.
According to a press release:
“Powered by a deck of 22 hand-painted Tarot cards and an accurate real-time map of the solar system, Kismet is meant to be experienced daily, with unique outcomes every calendar day that are directly tied to not only the cards that you choose, but your individual birth date and the actual alignment of celestial bodies at the time of your reading.”
I don’t know if an experience like Kismet will turn me into a devoted believer in the mystical arts of fortune telling, but it certainly sounds like a clever idea for an emerging new medium. Kismet can be purchased right now on Steam for both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive for $6.99, although it is on sale with a 29% discount as of the time of this writing.
