Hellicott City

Virtual Reality Experience

Take a haunted wagon ride through a nightmarish remake of Old Ellicott City. Created for a local "unusual" art show for Halloween.

It might scare the crap out of you!

Advice: This app probably won't terrify you, but VR in general has the potential to be REALLY SCARY. If you are brave enough to jump in blindly, go straight to the download link at the bottom of this post.

If you want a more detailed description of what this experience is before trying it or allowing a child to try it, keep on reading:

What exactly am I getting into?

• 5 minute Haunted Hayride / Roller Coaster-like experience.
• Cheesy nightmarish remake of an actual place with some spooky scenes.
• Sit-down experience. No character movement or input device needed, just head and positional tracking. A swivel chair is best as you can more easily turn around (you might want to turn around).

Will it make me sick?

• Everybody has different reactions to VR.
• You probably will feel some motion during the ride, hopefully because it's immersive and not because of low frame rate.
• Most people who have tried it (first timers and veterans) do not feel motion sickness after the ride.
• Performance varies on my machine from 60-75 FPS at some points, hangs in the 50-60 range for a bit, and occasionally dips lower than that at some points during the ride. If you're more sensitive, you'll notice that. I still have some optimizations to make, but I wanted to release on Halloween.

Is it terrifying or disturbing?

• It's as cheesy as it is scary.
• Some cheap jump scares.
• Scenes that might scare a child. Have a parent try it first if you are worried.

Binaural audio?

• Uses 3d positional audio on some sound effects, see if you can hear it.
• Courtesy of the 3Dception Unity plugin: http://twobigears.com/

More Information

• Hellicott City Postmortem