Omega Mart looks like a normal convenience store … then strange things happen.
Miaau Wolf
I’m in a convenience store in Las Vegas, and everywhere there are common cans of brightly colored soft drinks. A masked employee leads me to a wall where a strange garden is growing. My hands are robot hands. I see the garden and walk through, and there is a strange universe out there. I was withdrawn. We go to a staircase along the edge of the convenience store, go upstairs, and then things get even weirder.
I’m not at Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart, which has just opened in Las Vegas’ immersive art space, Area 15. I watch it all on a monitor at home. I see a live stream (at least I think it’s alive) walking through space, being recorded on camera and presented to me as if I were embodying a robot worker in this Omega Mart space. In essence, I am tele-present. And I love it.
Of course, Omega Mart does not make this kind of virtual visit possible. The experience is designed to be enjoyed in person, to explore this immersive theater space and to touch items, by walking through doors. It is now actually open for people to attend in person. But I’m not going to do that anytime soon.
I was not yet anywhere in a year, and although I was on the extreme side of what many people have been through over the past 12 months, I’m not alone. I used to go to Las Vegas once a year for the CES show, and in January 2020 I saw the still incomplete building of Area 15 in person. I went on a hard hat tour. I was hoping the Meega Wolf’s Omega Mart would be open soon. I was hoping to come back and visit it again.
The inside of Omega Mart looks massive.
Miaau Wolf
Meow Wolf, an enthralling art collective funded in part by Game of Thrones author George RR Martin, began a now cult-famous experience called The House of Eternal Return in Sante Fe, New Mexico. Meow Wolf has expanded to a theme park ride in Denver, and this experience in Las Vegas is the group’s next large-scale installation.
Like The House of Eternal Return, the Omega Mart space is filled with the works of captivating artists and musicians, with many rooms running through art experiences. Meow Wolf worked with Brian Eno, Amon Tobin and Santigold for some of the music in the project.
It looks like a convenience store – but the products are not normal products.
Miaau Wolf
It starts out as an everyday convenience store, but mutates afterward because it seems like strange doors are waving in a different overarching storyline. The experience provides staff member ID cards with RFID chips that can be scanned across the room. Meow Wolf intends to bring out storylines and branching experiences through multiple visits, and ultimately across Meow Wolf installations, using the RFID link.
“The RFID experience is a building block for a technology platform that will exist in the exhibition, but also in the long term outside the exhibition, and that will enable people to both create and co-create,” said Jim Ward , co-CEO of Meow. Wolf, tell me about a Zoom call.
Of course, in my last year at home, I got used to virtual theater experiences: projected in VR headsets, over Zoom, on headphones, on my furniture and desks. The chance to embody something in a physical space, as Meow Wolf made possible in my virtual tour, seems tempting. But that’s not currently part of the experience’s plans.
“I think now, what our bread and butter is, creates these impressive environments that are really hard to explain,” says Corvis Brinkerhoff, executive creative director of Meow Wolf and one of the founding members. “You just have to see it for yourself.”
Miaau Wolf
The immersive space had to change into its extremely practical, free-roaming installation for the COVID-19 era. Brinkerhoff says most of the exhibit doesn’t need to be changed, but “in some cases, we have small corridors that people go through, climb through, crawl through, and it’s made one-way.” Surfaces that are frequently touched are cleaned regularly. The staff, who play the role of employees in the store in Omega Mart, wear masks.
Meow Wolf seems to one day seem interested in a cross between distant and personally immersive. “The idea of an integral co-reality with both our physical sites and a digital co-presence is not just an opportunity, but something we absolutely want to do,” says Ward. “We’re taking a first step with RFID interactivity … Omega Mart is a first step towards that.”
Miaau Wolf
Meow Wolf also plans to expand its physical spaces. Dozens of phones in the Omega Mart space can be used to check messages in the voicemail and reach out to other phones where other characters or people may be, and eventually even in other exhibits in other cities.
“As we get more sophisticated about predictive modeling and behavior tracking … all of a sudden there might be a phone ringing next to you, and you answer it, and that’s that character,” Ward says.
But I would like something that can help me to attend now somehow, but not travel. I was wondering how it could travel to Disney happens virtually at home in VR, to bridge a gap to an ultimate real visit in the future. Meow Wolf can open such doors for people at home and entice them to finally pay a real visit to the physical Omega Mart. I’m renting a robot body for a while (or someone who allows me to see their experience as a tele-presence).
Maybe it’s not going on right now. But for Meow Wolf and other immersive spaces, it will help bridge the gap between now and when I take my next vacation. It is unfortunately not soon.