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
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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.
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