Channeling our Inner Jack Ryan

Amazon Prime went all out with the promotion of their new series, Jack Ryan, at San Diego Comic Con last week. In addition to a huge “poster” on the side of one of the hotels and the standard fan panel, they also had a very ambitious “experience” outside the convention center which took up the better part of a city block. The idea was to allow the fans to enter the first episode of the series. The area, once you braved the lines to get inside, was decorated with impressive detail like a Middle Eastern bazaar. The two major activities included an escape room where you could basically enter real scenes from the pilot, and a very ambitious VR experience where you got to “train” to be a field agent.

Amazon offered me a chance to try the VR experience and I jumped at it. Sometime later, I found myself wearing a heavy-duty 5-point climbing harness and a VR backpack on my back as well as booties on my feet and gloves on my hands, all covered with black plastic boxes festooned with blinking lights. It felt like I was heading into the Oasis, which was somewhat accurate, I guess. We climbed up a metal scaffolding 4 stories to our “helicopter”, where we waited in the back in jump seats until it was our turn. After checking all our gear – harness and VR – we donned our VR helmets and were attached by our harnesses to a line and then lowered from the helicopter to “rappel” onto the rooftop (see the pictures of the set above). From there, we were detached from the line and had to walk over a narrow plank between two buildings which shook as you crossed it (in reality, it was a quite solid 4-6 foot wide bridge that shook when you crossed it), then engage some insurgents in a gun battle in the top floor of a building, then zipline out of the building, run to a Jeep, and drive to the extraction point. My mission didn’t go exactly according to plan as the gloves malfunctioned after the zipline and so instead we had to abort and I was rushed into a “safe house” instead of driving the Jeep.

However, all-in-all, it was a pretty cool experience. The combination of real objects/sets and VR and the physicality of ziplining and running within what was basically a video game was pretty cool, even if it didn’t always work exactly right. It was definitely a step up from a regular VR game (I have the bruises on my knee to prove it!) Crossing the planks felt very real (I don’t love heights!) and I’ll admit that it was easy enough to get totally immersed in teh experience (which was apparently also a competition of some sort). You can see my video below (it’s mostly a promo for the show, but I do appear!)

Don’t miss Jack Ryan on Amazon Prime, starting on August 31st!