![]() ![]() Technology also has helped to make Seismique more pandemic-protocol-friendly. (Who even knew “gamification” was a thing? It involves using gaming techniques to engage and motivate people.) One room is reserved for on-site STEM classes where schoolchildren will create digital animations and see them come to life on the surrounding walls. Seismique is more high tech than its competition in other cities, incorporating projection mapping, holograms, augmented reality, light mapping, motion tracking and gamification into its trippy environments. ![]() He once was the world’s largest producer of haunted houses, and he co-founded Escape the Room, which has 22 locations across the U.S. And Kopelman has four decades of his own experience with immersive venues. The lobby, for example - a fully analog optical illusion designed as a respite from the sensory overload - mimics the famous black and white cartoon cafes of Seoul, South Korea. Kopelman says he avoided visiting House of Eternal Return, but he and Corley did draw from other artist influences. Petersburg, Fla., a smaller venue called Fairgrounds will open in 2021. Columbus, Ohio, boasts the artist-run Otherworld, and in St. Meow Wolf has grown into a corporate entertainment giant, with larger, slicker venues opening next year in Las Vegas and Denver.Īttendance at interactive venues has cratered this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic - Meow Wolf’s original House of Eternal Return is still closed - but a number of companies are in the game. There’s nothing exactly like Seismique anywhere, although it belongs to the class of so-called “experiential museums” begat by Meow Wolf, the once lovably funky artists’ collective that launched its first permanent exhibit in 2016 in an abandoned bowling alley in Santa Fe, N.M. Many of the artists are from Houston or Texas. The place has been a hive of creative collaboration most of this year, yielding installations that combine the high-tech gizmos of young digital media geniuses with serious hands-on craftsmanship by muralists and entertainment-industry veterans. Thus the name, which in spite of the Frenchified spelling is pronounced “seismic.” Founders Steve Kopelman and Josh Corley told artists the spaceship’s crash caused ripples across the world. The environments suggest the bays of a spaceship that’s a Noah’s Ark of the universe, containing the native surroundings of beings that have been collected from different galaxies. Though the building’s turquoise facade and jaunty, colorful signage hint at the fun inside, what awaits still jolts the senses: a maze of more than 30 woozy rooms driven by technical wonderments, the dazzle of more than 9 million programmed LEDs, and the hands and minds of about 50 artists. 26, Seismique transforms a former Bed, Bath & Beyond retail space on Houston’s far west side into a 40,000-square-foot, sci-fi-fantasy playground. Photo: Melissa Phillip, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer After eight months of pandemic-induced stupor that has limited so much “immersive” entertainment to computer, phone and TV screens, the city’s newest attraction offers a truly physical escape from reality.
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