Of the many, many booths one could scope out at San Diego Comic-Con, one is letting you experience virtual reality AND take it home. On Preview Night Wednesday, the Legendary Pictures booth unveiled Legendary VR, a themed, movie-based virtual experience you can download to your phone to be used in conjunction with Google Cardboard. And the greatest part? You can take it home for zero dollars.
The Legendary VR app will take fans inside the worlds of upcoming films Crimson Peak, directed by Guillermo del Toro, and Warcraft, directed by Duncan Jones, who was on hand to unveil a life size Orgrim at the booth to go along with the WETA booth’s life size King Llane. Legitimately. If you’ve never had a virtual reality experience before (never tried Oculus Rift or something), these will blow your mind. I hadn’t; the last virtual thing I tried was Nintendo’s Virtual Boy back in the ’90s, with its awesome red vector graphics.
In the Beware Crimson Peak VR experience, the Google Cardboard wearer floats along up to the Allerdale Hall and enters, all while Tom Hiddleston’s voice fills your earholes. As you continue along the long corridor, moths fly by and everything seems like it could be okay… but it’s not. Just when you least expect it, a red ghost materializes out of the floor and roars at you. It’s legitimately terrifying, and it took several minutes for my heart to beat regularly again. Two exclusive Mondo posters, drawn by Daniel Danger and Guy Davis, in the gallery below, were also given away.
As a change of pace, and of not being quite as scared, the Warcraft: The Skies of Azeroth virtual experience puts wearers on the back of a griffin as it soars over the kingdom from the film. It’s gorgeous, and the sounds of wind blowing and the griffin screeching fill your ears. If you look down, you see the head of the thing you’re flying on! It was amazing.
Both of these, along with the Pacific Rim jaeger-piloting experience, are available on the Legendary VR app. But, to use it, you need Google Cardboard…but guess what! Legendary and their corporate partners at Google are giving away 50,000 Google Cardboards for people at SDCC, the largest such distribution of devices they’ve ever done.
Barnaby Legg, Legendary Pictures’ VP of theatrical strategy, told us that letting everybody experience VR is exactly what they’re aiming for. “Last year, we did a virtual reality experience that was running on really high-end gaming PCs, so it was a cool experience, but a limited experience,” Legg said. “Here we went in with a different philosophy which was how can we make sure as many people as possible experience VR? So we’re calling this our VR gift to the fans.”
If you’re at SDCC, head to the Legendary booth, #3920, and be among the 50,000 to get virtual anywhere you can take your phone. Just be aware that you WILL feel like you’re there.
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Nerdist is a subsidiary  Legendary Digital Entertainment, which is part of Legendary Entertainment.  It may sound like I’m being all “Yay, Legendary!” but seriously, Legendary VR was just that cool.
