‘Sisters’ & the Social Experience of VR Horror

Otherworld Interactive recently announced that their horror experience Sisters just surpassed one million downloads for Google Cardboard. To celebrate, they released a compilation of reaction videos of people screaming and slamming VR headsets into the ground.

While doing horror in VR by yourself may be utterly terrifying, experiencing horror in VR while other people are watching you can be a lot of fun. Your terror and screaming is immediately following by a lot of uncontrollable laughter, which can be really contagious. Overall, it’s such an peak emotional experience that people want to capture and share online. These videos of visceral reactions are in part what has fueled Sisters to become one of the first VR applications to reach one million downloads.

I had a chance to catch up with Otherworld Interactive co-founder Robyn Tong Gray to talk about why people like to be scared, using indirect control to trigger action in VR narratives, cultivating emotional presence, and creating an ambiance and soundscape to amplify your VR story.

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Here’s the reaction video compilation celebrating a million downloads of Sisters

Here’s Robyn’s talk from the Unity VR/AR Vision Summit titled “Emotional Presence in Virtual Reality: The Making of Café Âme and Sisters”

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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip