4D

Recently, Let’s Go Out took the time to curate a list of the top 5 escape games in London, and we’re happy to say we’re on it. Per their website: ‘Escape Rooms have taken the genre to another level, with 4D sensory experiences that will test all your senses and fully immerse you into the game. At their London Bridge location, you can choose from Pharaoh’s Chamber and Room 33 (set in 17th century China). Book now and see why they earned a Certificate of Excellence from TripAdvisor. At this time of year, they have festive offers including early bird discounts!’

For the uninitiated, ‘4D sensory experiences’ means you’re in a physical room with physical objects, not some VR hellscape created by a misused computer sciences graduate. It’s sort of like being in your own home as opposed to a virtual recreation of your own home, which is prone to lag, or glitch in such a manner that the mug of coffee on the table sometimes teleports up through the ceiling. Instead, you must physically move the coffee cup yourself to make it move, but 4D reality is a little more exciting than that. This basically just means that you’re literally locked in a room with a mission to complete where you can definitely touch and interact with things rather than a 3D experience which might put you in a room with a mission, but you aren’t allowed to actually things.

Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with virtual escape games. Or that I’ve been told I have to balance out the preceding with something ‘nicer’. Escape games began as a virtual experience – Japanese mobile app games, as mentioned in a previous blog. You can do wonderful, imaginative things with VR – things you simply can’t do in real life. Like filming Avatar, or a sequel to Avatar, or a sequel to the sequel of Avatar. Imagine trying to build real-life 7-foot-high smurfs. It’d simply be impractical.

It’s simply to say that, in the conflict between the real world and the Matrix we are Neo. We prefer the real experience. Why throw a digital prop at one of your teammates when you can throw an actual prop at them instead?

You can find the Let’s Go Out article here.