A virtual tour of the newest Meow Wolf attraction in Vegas

I’m at a convenience store in Las Vegas, with generic cans of colorful sodas everywhere. A masked employee guides me to a wall where a strange garden is growing. My hands are the hands of robots. I see the garden and pass it, and there is a strange universe beyond. I’m pulled back. We head for a stairway along the edge of the convenience store, go up the stairs and then things get even stranger.

I’m not at Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart, which just opened inside Las Vegas’ immersive art space, Area 15. Instead, I’m watching it all on a monitor at home. I’m watching a live broadcast (at least I think it’s live) walking through space, recorded by the camera and presented to me as if I were incorporating a robot worker into this Omega Mart space. In essence, I am tele-witnessing. And I love it.

Of course, Omega Mart is not enabling this type of virtual tour. The experience is designed to be lived in person, exploring this surrounding theatrical space and touching items, passing through doors. In fact, it is now open for people to attend in person. But I’m not going to do that anytime soon.

I have not been anywhere in a year, and although I have been on the extreme side of what many people have been through in the past 12 months, I am not alone. I used to go to Las Vegas once a year for the CES show and, in January 2020, I personally saw the still incomplete building in Area 15. I took a tour with a helmet. I was hoping that Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart would open soon. I expected to come back and pay a visit when that happened.

Meow Wolf, an immersive art collective funded in part by Game of Thrones author George RR Martin, started in Sante Fe, New Mexico, with a now famous cult experience called The House of Eternal Return. Meow Wolf has expanded to a theme park in Denver, and this Las Vegas experience is the group’s next large-scale installation.

Like The House of Eternal Return, the Omega Mart space is filled with works by engaging artists and musicians, with many rooms being art experiences in passing. Meow Wolf worked with Brian Eno, Amon Tobin and Santigold for some of the project’s songs.

It starts out as a mundane convenience store, but changes after that, as strange doors seem to beckon to another overarching storyline. The experience issues employee ID cards with RFID chips that can be scanned across the space. Meow Wolf intends for branching stories and experiences to emerge through multiple visits and, eventually, through Meow Wolf facilities, using the RFID link.

“The RFID experience is a foundation for a technology platform that will exist both in the exhibition but also in the long term outside the exhibition, and will allow people to create and co-create,” Jim Ward, co-CEO of Meow Wolf, me said during a call from Zoom.

Of course, in my last year at home, I got used to virtual theater experiences: on virtual reality headsets, on Zoom, on headphones, projected on my furniture and desks. The chance to incorporate something into a physical space, like the Meow Wolf made possible on my virtual tour, seems tempting. But it is not part of the experiment plans now.

“I think now, our bread and butter is to create these mind-blowing immersive environments that are really difficult to explain,” said Corvis Brinkerhoff, Executive Creative Director at Meow Wolf and one of its founding members. “You just have to see it for yourself.”

The immersive space had to make changes to its extremely practical and free installation for the COVID-19 era. Brinkerhoff says that most of the exhibition did not need to be changed, but “in some cases, we have small passages that people pass through, climb, crawl and these were made in one way”. Highly touched surfaces are often cleaned. Employees, playing convenience store employees at Omega Mart, wear masks.

Meow Wolf seems interested in a cross between remote immersion and immersive in person, someday. “The idea of ​​an integral co-reality with our physical sites and a digital co-presence is not just an opportunity, but something that we absolutely want to do,” says Ward. “We are taking the first step with RFID interactivity … Omega Mart is the first step in that direction.”

Miau Wolf is also planning to unite his physical spaces. Dozens of phones in the Omega Mart space can be used to check voicemail messages and reach other phones where other characters or people may be and, eventually, even at other exhibitions in other cities.

“When we become more sophisticated around predictive modeling and behavioral tracking … all of a sudden, a phone can ring right next to you and you answer, and that’s that character,” says Ward.

But I would love something that could help me participate now, in some way, but not travel. I wondered how traveling to Disney could happen virtually at home in VR, filling the gap for a possible real visit in the future. Lobo Miau could open doors like this for people at home, attracting them to an eventual royal visit to the physical Omega Mart. I would rent a robot body for a while, for sure (or, a person who would let me “see” your experience as a telepresence host).

This may not be happening now. But for Meow Wolf and other immersive spaces, it would help to bridge the gap between now and whenever I take my next vacation. Which, unfortunately, is not so soon.