Back to the future

This evening I finally got around to trying The Void at Times Square. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a shared walk-around VR experience.

In this particular experience, the tech is used to simulate you and your friends being the heroes of Ghostbusters. Essentially, you walk around shooting ghosts, which is fun.**

Yet to me one of the most surprising aspects of the experience was what happened when we arrived. My friend and I turned up with our SmartPhones, and we showed the ushers the tickets we had each purchased on-line.

They said we needed to have paper tickets. They pointed us to the ticket vendor line, so that the person there could print out our ticket on paper. Only after our tickets had been safely printed out on paper were we allowed to enter The Void.

I love the irony. We had paid to experience the shareable technology of the future, and we hadn’t known exactly what we would find.

But what we found was more surprising than we could have imagined: In the future, when Virtual Reality is everywhere, your tickets will still need to be printed out on paper.

** No actual ghosts were harmed during the making of this experience

2 thoughts on “Back to the future”

  1. That’s really ironic.

    Visiting NYC a few months ago, we skipped past big lines at the MOMA and 1WTC ticket desks by just purchasing admission on the phone and showing the screen to the guard at the entrance.

  2. Interesting. Experiences that focus on the past are more future-thinking than an experience that focuses on the future. Ironic indeed!

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