I'll Stay in Normal Reality, Thanks

Lydia's Dad's crew is still in town so we've been entertaining them with all of the wonders of Seattle.

Their Kirkland Airbnb.

There's a Sandbox VR place in Totem Lake that I've walked by about 400 times and have been curious. Evan is into his Meta Quest 2 and this is kind of like that but with a group, and you get to hold an actual gun controller as well, so you get to do cool team shoot-em-up missions.

Things got off to a bad start immediately. There was a bunch of warnings when I signed up about getting their early, they'd cancel my reservation but still charge me if I was late and the world would end, etc. So of course when I got there on time, they weren't ready, and were busy setting up another team. We stood around and waited I would estimate a half hour before they let us in.

The fans turn on at important moments in the story. Virtual Reality!!

Another advancement over Meta Quest was they put sensors on your arms and legs so the simulator has a better sense of where your body actually is rather than just your head. We were plagued with technical problems. We were stuck in a training simulator forever trying to get our weapons to work. When we did finally get going on our mission we had more issues but we'd already been through so much that I think we just wanted to get it over with.

The only branded mission option was a Star Trek one so I chose that because I guessed it would be higher quality. It had a little story line and everything. There were a few places in the game where we were doing investigations with our tricorders which I thought was pretty cool. It wasn't all just shooting aliens, but there was plenty of that as well.

Overall it was a pretty expensive, pretty bad experience with poor graphics. I'm glad I did it but I think that it was fun for the wrong reasons and I don't think I will be back any time soon. Honestly for all the torture they put us through it should have been free. The place wasn't exactly bursting with customers either so I would expect this place to be out of business soon.

I think these janky videos they send you afterwards do a good job of capturing the insanity.