Using VR and haptic vests to transport users to a sweaty club in 1980s Britain, In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats is so realistic that you might need a lie down afterwards
Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email
I’m not the kind of person who you’d normally find at an illegal rave at a regular raving time, let alone 9am on a Wednesday. But that’s where I found myself this week – virtually, anyway: with a haptic vest strapped on to my back, a controller in each hand and a virtual reality headset covering my eyes, I’m transported back to 1989, hooning through the suburbs with my friends to find a secret dancefloor.
Darren Emerson’s award-winning interactive VR film, In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats, tracks the acid-house movement and rave scene in Coventry, UK. It’s wholly transportive – I forget that I’m actually standing in the middle of an empty studio in metro Melbourne, because for half an hour I’m in the back of a car, in a friend’s poster-strewn bedroom, in a police station, hurtling down a freeway, bumping up against sweaty bodies in a club and walking through a forest hungover as the day breaks and the sun peeks through the trees.
About Author
More Stories
‘Godfather of AI’ shortens odds of the technology wiping out humanity over next 30 years
How owls helped me conquer my fear of the dark
‘All people could do was hope the nerds would fix it’: the global panic over the millennium bug, 25 years on