There are six people with me. We're all sitting cross-legged on the floor, forming a circle around a glass coffee table. The setting is a comfortable living room in what could be any suburban California home. Judging by the black and white TV set near the wall and the record player next to me, I'd peg the time period as the mid-1960s. My friends are all groovy-looking types with long hair, beads, flowered polyester. Everyone is trying to sit still, but they percolate like they're waiting for something. It's making me anxious, so as they close their eyes and slow their breathing, I slow mine as well.
That's when I notice the orange couch off to the left of me looks a bit less orange than it did a moment before. Wait, now it's bright orange. It keeps desaturating, then saturating. And does the room suddenly look brighter, too? I glance at the grinning blonde girl to my right. She's blissed out. Behind her is a blue chair. Its breathing (uh, yeah, breathing) matches mine.
My friends can't sit still. One strokes the carpet, which appears to be vibrating. Another picks up an African drum and starts tapping. At this point, I'm a little sweaty.
I try to center myself by concentrating on the glass tabletop. It starts rippling, then melts and dribbles all over the floor. The legs fall inward and flames erupt. None of my companions seem surprised to see a raging campfire in the middle of the living room. On the contrary, they're delighted, and grow even more so when the ceiling disintegrates. We all look up at millions of shimmering stars against an ink-black sky. The breathing furniture rises from the floor and slowly floats away as the walls fade. Suddenly we're in the desert, with Joshua trees and alien rock formations beneath vibrant starry sky. The guy to my left slowly turns toward me, a look of ecstasy and terror on his face. We lock eyes. He stares at me intently. I stare back, straight into his soul.
But I'm not out under the stars frying on 500 mics. I'm sitting cross-legged on the floor of a hotel ballroom in Austin, Texas—wearing an HTC Vive and a pair of headphones. Because this trip came courtesy of Origins, a VR experience created to promote the new documentary Orange Sunshine.
The documentary (which is excellent, you should see it!) follows the rise and fall of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, counterculture rebels from Laguna Beach, California, who were responsible for the distribution of alarmingly pure and potent LSD in the late 1960s and early '70s. The documentary takes its name from the group's most well-known product, which was dumped into the burgeoning counterculture by the truckload. The Brotherhood's little orange pills were responsible for "turning on" a significant number of American kids during that era, forever changing the path of the country's popular culture by steering a legion of LSD devotees toward new artistic and spiritual ideals. Ask any old head from back in the day, and she'll tell you: Sunshine was the real shit.
The film, directed by William A. Kirkley, is creative in its use of recreations to tell big pieces of the story. The Brotherhood members---all of whom have done their time since being busted and are free to sit for interviews---were intensely secretive (for obvious reasons) while running their international drug ring. It's very rare to see a photograph of Brotherhood members together, and no archival footage exists, so Kirkley hired actors and shot reimagined historical scenes on Super 8. The technique works, mostly because the recreations are intercut with on-screen interviews with real-life Brotherhood members, and also because Kirkley's interludes stay lighthearted and don't stray into cheesy, America's Most Wanted-style melodrama.
The same actors who appear in the film's recreations show up in the VR experience. Each was filmed against a green screen, then placed into the virtual set—along with all the trippy effects—by Los Angeles production house Master of Shapes. The subtle color shifts and vibrations are filters that play randomly so each user sees different things: one might see the carpet pulsating; another will see Deep Dream imagery crawling on people's faces.
Kirkley says the VR experience may make its way onto the Vive in an official capacity—but for now, he hopes to use it as a tool to draw people into theaters to see the film. "I imagine setting it up in the lobby of the theater when we do a screening," he says. "People are always waiting for things to show up on streaming now. I'd like to encourage people to come see it in the theater." (Orange Sunshine will have distribution soon, Kirkley says.)
The director says it's the first VR depiction of an acid trip he's aware of. Then again, VR technology itself—with its profound dissociative effect and sensory manipulation—is already authentically psychedelic. Origins just goes one step further by explicitly attempting to simulate the hallucinations one would experience after taking mind-altering drugs. Mercifully, it lasts only four minutes and not 12 hours.
So it has to be asked: how close was it to the real thing? The walls evaporating and the furniture flying out into space was good for a laugh, but kind of hokey, and not something you'd really see on LSD. (Granted, that may depend on how much Sunshine you eat.) The subtler effects, though—the queasy surround-sound audio, the breathing chair, the moving carpet, the shifting colors—were right on. But the most intense and true part of the experience came when the guy to my left turned and locked eyes with me. His stare is one I've received (and likely given) before while watching my own coffee table melt. It was an intense moment. Staring back into those eyes, connecting with this image of a fully digitized actor projected onto a pair of LCD screens inches from my face, I felt a familiar fear. It was remarkably unsettling. Good thing I could just take the goggles off and return to reality.
