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Welcome to Being There, a column on the emerging world of immersive entertainment — from virtual reality and theme parks, to haunted houses and interactive theater. Written by The Verge senior editor Bryan Bishop.

Being There

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Dreamscape Immersive wants to bring location-based VR to the masses, starting with a shopping mall

Elgato announces a professional $199 light rig for Twitch streamers and YouTube creators

Chained mixes virtual reality and live actors to tell a dark Christmas tale

How Two Bit Circus is turning its 21st century carnival into one giant game

Delusion: Lies Within mixes movies and immersive theater to create a creepy, campy VR adventure

How a creative think tank in Austin is developing a new generation of interactive storytellers

A day in real-life Westworld from a host’s perspective

The SimuLife Diaries, part eight: I sacrificed myself to save two worlds

The SimuLife Diaries, part seven: I stopped an evil megacorp and had a neon rave

The SimuLife Diaries, part six: I had a home-cooked meal with a family that doesn’t exist

The SimuLife Diaries, part five: I just brokered a tech deal worth $1.29 billion

The SimuLife Diaries, part four: I have my own personal Tyler Durden

The SimuLife Diaries: a four-day immersive story adventure

The SimuLife Diaries, part three: I was kidnapped by anti-technology anarchists

The SimuLife Diaries, part two: I found a stranger from another dimension in my  hotel room shower

The SimuLife Diaries, part one: I’m a transdimensional doppelgänger

Dreamscape Immersive’s Alien Zoo takes guests to an interstellar Jurassic Park

With Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire, virtual reality is finally ready for prime-time

How a secret Los Angeles club hid an interactive story inside a music festival

I spent seven months living inside a conspiracy thriller and it’s not over yet

Why haunted houses are Hollywood’s next big thing

Hollywood and AMC theaters are betting on VR with Dreamscape Immersive

Immersive entertainment has a naming problem

How HBO’s Westworld installation made fans ‘the center of the universe’

Disney wants to build a Westworld for Star Wars fans

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena proves that great virtual reality means going beyond the headset

Movie theaters are becoming roller coasters, whether you like it or not

Theme parks are the inevitable evolution of franchise movies

How two Disney Imagineers built a better escape room with The Nest

How the Overlook Film Festival turned itself into a living, breathing horror movie

Disney’s Star Wars land will be ‘immersive,’ but what does that actually mean?

Cults, chaos, and community: how The Tension Experience rewrote the rules of storytelling

The Future of Fear: How Los Angeles became the heart of immersive horror

The Future of Fear: I was eaten alive by an escape room cannibal

The Future of Fear: The scariest movie this Halloween is a play called Delusion

The Future of Fear: How the creators of Blackout are bringing the extreme haunted house into your living room

The Future of Fear: Inside the psychological maze of LA's most insidious theater event

The FTC is suing Microsoft to block its Activision Blizzard purchase

ChatGPT proves AI is finally mainstream — and things are only going to get weirder

Sonos and Ikea made a floor lamp speaker that could be perfect for surround sound

The biggest announcements and trailers from the Game Awards 2022

Dwarf Fortress is no longer PC’s most inscrutable game