‘The owners of ‘The Museum of Ultimate Virtual Reality’s’ are like a collection of angry dads who learned to communicate only through passive aggressive demonstrations and intermittent huffing. And if they are dads, their families have abandoned them and they’ve turned to a new audience for the vaguely trauma-inducing but not entirely off-base point of ‘The Museum,’ which seems to be: technology is bad.

Video games. Blu-ray discs. QR menus at restaurants. The entirety of the internet. No digital realm is safe from ‘The Museum of Ultimate Virtual Reality’s’ commentary and they seem to find a new bone to pick each year.

The experience itself requires a traveler to strap a non-functional pair of goggles to their head in order to peruse an environment that might be compared to Wisconsin’s ‘House on the Rock.’ The discomfort one feels at viewing ‘The Museum’s’ scenes through this narrow vantage point is meant to evoke the reins of the tech industry and our experience of the world through iphone selfies and, yes, virtual reality which seemed like it would become much more of a ‘thing’ when ‘The Museum’ was established. This foundational perspective ages ‘The Museum’ in a way that is actually ironic, but that doesn’t seem to have registered with management, who have largely doubled-down on their anti-tech stance with a notable exception for the use of AI-generated imagery on posters, a trait for which all men of their generation are known.’

‘The Museum of Ultimate Virtual Reality’s’ gimmick is the draw, making it an innocuous stop.

But it’s not an easy experience.

It’s a lesson built on the try-hard irony of previous generations with an emphasis on the ‘trying-hard.’ The venue is impressive, both in scope and maintenance. It covers just under an acre if the website is correct. Much of it is inside or sheltered in such a way that it can be traversed in poor weather and a great deal of care has been taken to fill out the details in a way that is evocative at every turn but not busy. 

The trouble is that it’s taken in through blinders: ‘The Museum’s’ proprietary virtual reality visualization system which is essentially no more than a cardboard box strapped to one’s head. The box is assembled with such little care and maintained so poorly that ‘The Museum’s’ derision comes through with a vividness one might attribute to parody. The people I meet exhibit no such self-awareness.

They’re just angry.

They make me put away my phone and they glance begrudgingly at my watch which is digital but not smart. They take my sunglasses simply because they sometimes can’t tell what’s tech and what isn’t. This is spoken with the confidence of people who not only believe that tech might be so inconspicuous as to be invisible in my (largely translucent) frames but assume everybody else is on their side already. Once I’ve been de-teched, I’m given my ‘goggles’ which are thinner and rattier even than I expected, the cardboard stained and weakened by the face-grease of wearers before me. 

Wandering the acreage is… nice.

For a while I’m left alone to peer at scenes arranged from mis-matched dolls and massive, highly-realistic statues of global cryptids and collections of old books turned to illustrations too vulgar or gory to grace modern pages. There is a wild garden and a hive of colorful beetles and an army of animatronic presidents from a world in which the runners-up actually won.

The goggles begin to chafe midday and, after checking again that I am alone, I choose to slip them back over my forehead for a short break. An alarm blares and employees rush in. They surround me, ignoring my apologies, and they begin to clap. 

Taking the goggles off is the lesson, apparently. 

-traveler