Location-based Harry Potter VR experiences will be available at the Harry Potter store opening this summer in New York.
The new store will feature two entirely new experiences for Harry Potter fans. The store itself has large props recreated from the movies and totals 21,000 square feet across three floors. It’s located at 935 Broadway and is set to open on June 3.
Both VR experiences are multiplayer minigames and only available from the store. The first is called Chaos at Hogwarts, which Forbes says will let “hopeful witches and wizards step into a magical journey to Hogwarts Castle, where magical creatures and secrets await.” The second is called Wizards Take Flight, which “prepares guests to fly on brooms and use their wands to battle against Death Eaters.”
There are no images or further details of either experience for now, but it will be interesting to see how they’re implemented. We don’t know what headsets will be used at this point in time.
For Wizards Take Flight in particular, there’s a great opportunity for the VR experience to be combined with physical broom props that players could sit on while playing, potentially with integrated physical movement and haptics. But, any way you look at it, VR motion controllers make the perfect substitutes for wands.
This is the first official Harry Potter VR experience we can recall, although there was a tie-in experience for Fantastic Beasts in the early days of the Google Daydream. The less said about that the better.
Will you be checking out the Harry Potter VR experiences when they launch this summer? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
