Madame Tussauds Hollywood is offering a new VR attraction next to the Walk of Fame and the Chinese Theatre.
The 4-player VR installation is from the Virtual Room and situated among the wax inhabitants of Hollywood Boulevard. The Virtual Room operates similar installations in Europe, as well as a second location in Hollywood.
The system inside Madame Tussauds uses up to four HTC Vives in separate pods. You can see the other players in VR and the microphones work well to foster communication. The future is dying due to some mishap with time travel and it is now up to your team to go back to various points in the past and change history. Each player has a room-scale space to walk around inside and tasks require players to work together. Destinations the team can visit include the moon for the 1969 Apollo landing, an ancient Egyptian area and a medieval dungeon.
We experienced a few bugs when I tried the experience with some friends. Before we started, one player’s height was set wrong so her feet were in the floor. The rest of us spent our first 10 minutes in a virtual waiting room as that was fixed. We also experienced a progression-halting bug during one of the experiences. A wooden rod we needed to move an object in the world simply didn’t appear for me. Any time you get stuck, a game operator watching outside VR can push the experience through to its next step.
It is possible that pricing can change, but initially tickets are around $12 per person to visit just one of the locations we tried for about 10 to 15 minutes. That adds up extremely fast, with a longer trip in VR to multiple destinations easily costing well over $100 if four people wanted to experience all of it. Madame Tussauds and Virtual Room are offering an interesting take on VR attractions and cooperative experiences, but more work needs to be done with their software design, however, so that people can trust that the reason they are stuck is they haven’t figured out a piece of the puzzle — not because the experience itself is broken.
Tickets are available on a walk up basis only at the time of this writing, but online tickets should be available soon.
I’ll be curious to see how this attraction performs in light of new launches like The VOID’s new $33 horror experience, or Dave & Buster’s 5-minute Jurassic World experience which costs only $5.
