Once you strap into this peculiar virtual reality experience you’ll question everything.
The Museum of Sex is beta testing a new VR experience that transports you into another dimension where sight, sound and touch are heightened and played with.
The “Celestial Bodies” experience, created by a host of artists and game designers from the museum and the Superbright technology studio, transports you to an almost hallucinatory state.
After entering a “portal” and meeting your assigned attendant, you are strapped into futuristic VR equipment quite snugly before entering your single-person “elevator” to space.
What follows can only be described as weird and slightly disorienting.
Stepping into a 1,000-square-foot room that has been virtually expanded into an expanse of space, you’ll start hearing Diplo’s “Set It Off” as a very artsy take on exotic dancers invades the environment. Moving figures, which are your fellow explorers, can be seen and interacted with but they’re made of colors that can attach to your own avatar if you get close enough, which can also result in feeling vibration from your VR suit. Other figures fall through the sky and actors (with your permission) playfully tap you and lead you around like something out of a fever dream or a fantastical sci-fi film.
“It aims to give the public a sense of the sexual significance of this new and quickly evolving technology through anticipation, sexual attraction, identity, presence, touch, scale, comfort, daring and spatial awareness,” the museum says in a news release.
Andres Hernandez, who was on a date, said he was at first intimidated but curious before stepping into the VR room but then it got weird, he said.
“Once is enough,” he said with a smile.
If you want to experience the installation for yourself, tickets are $17.50, and it’s open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. during the week, until 11 p.m. on Saturdays, and from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Sundays at 233 Fifth Ave.
