Mentalist Derren Brown has been active since 2000, creating all sorts of strange and miraculous experiences. His latest exploit? A theme park ride commissioned for Thorpe Park. This ride is no normal ride, though. Even by “scary” or “creepy” standards, it’s quite an achievement. The ride boasts realistic movement and multiple endings, and the thing that sets it apart and makes it all possible is the same thing some are saying may be the start of an upward climb for HTC; the Vive Pre.
The ride is an interactive ghost train designed with tons of twists, turns and plenty of choices for the rider body as a whole to make. The ride is meant to be quite scary, perhaps even too much for the faint of heart. It begins with a walk into an old warehouse and over an iron bridge into a train car that’s suspended from the roof by chains. Twelve possible journeys and two available endings await those who make it. The whole shebang lasts between 10 and 15 minutes depending on the actions of the riders and potentially other factors, and is powered by the HTC Vive Pre. Each rider gets one of the powerful headsets, which can work in concert in the same space with little to no impact on overall performance. This is, of course, Derren Brown, so nobody will likely have the full picture until the ride launches at some point in the Spring.
This ride is hopefully only the tip of the iceberg. The HTC Vive Pre, though expensive and requiring a high-end system to act as the backend, boasts incredible possibilities. Mostly, it’s set apart by a number of luxury features, including a front camera that enables augmented reality applications in incredible detail and resolution as if they were VR applications. In this particular instance, the Vive Pre will get a chance to show its chops to a wide array of consumers, given Thorpe Park’s popularity. No plans for other VR rides were announced by Thorpe Park, making it quite likely that this first one will be used to gauge the feasibility of more VR rides.