Ohio’s futuristic immersive art experience, Otherworld, is opening a second venue in Philadelphia. An imaginative new take on immersive, story-driven art experiences, Otherworld transcends its roots in haunted houses and escape rooms to offer a mesmerising alternate world, filled with large-scale art and mixed-reality playgrounds.
The brainchild of Jordan Renda, Otherworld is the work of a team of over 100 creatives. The experience is described by its creators as a ‘combination of a museum and a large-scale installation’. It takes visitors on a futuristic, self-driven journey through fantastical realms peopled by dazzling creatures and featuring digitally augmented art, puzzles, immersive rooms and secret passageways. For visitors, it offers a new way to experience art.
The Columbus, Ohio venue allows its visitors to explore 32,000 square metres of immersive art experiences. Here, art is fused with cutting-edge tech, including projection equipment from leading supplier and partner, Optoma. A loose narrative links the experiences, concerning Otherworld, Inc., a company whose experiments with VR have gotten out of hand, and the dreamworlds have broken through.
The new location in Philadelphia will be on an even bigger scale. For this project, the team have partnered with Thirteenth Floor Entertainment Group, producers of world-class location-based interactive experiences. The immersive Philadelphia attraction will feature more than 55 rooms, mixed reality (MR) playrooms, and installations.
According to the press release, guests will experience ‘iridescent creatures and primordial monsters, crawlable tubes and infinite expanses of light, and alluring art with depth and a captivating narrative’.
From haunted houses to escape rooms
Blooloop caught up with the concept’s founder, Jordan Renda, who has a background in haunted houses and escape rooms. He explains: “Experiential entertainment is pretty much all I’ve ever done.”
From a young age, he created haunted houses around the neighbourhood, in basements and backyards:
“When we moved down to Florida, I noticed there weren’t any haunts in the area. I ended up doing my first commercial attraction in an old furniture store. It was a collective effort with my family. It was small – a $30,000 start-up; a DIY haunted house that ended up doing well.”
They kept growing the enterprise, opening new attractions every year:
“We did that for five or six years. We had one going in Jacksonville, Florida, and then tried one up in the Columbus area. That was what lay the foundation for the rest of the work that I’ve been doing in the experiential location-based entertainment space.”
He built up a network of people, and started an escape room:
“I opened it with one of the scenic designers I’d worked with on the haunt. It was back when no one had come across escape rooms. We were one of the first groups to open one up, down in Charlotte back in 2015.”
It was a success:
“We had four different games. The banks in Charlotte are a big thing, and they ended up becoming our biggest clients. They’d bring out all their different departments for team-building activities. It went well.”
The inspiration for Otherworld
At this point, the team had the option either to keep growing the escape room concept or to move in a different direction.
“Escape rooms are great, but you’re working with a limited budget and a small space. There are a lot of constraints. It can make for an interesting experience, but I had the ambition to do something on a larger scale.”
The initial concept for Otherworld started as an escape room on a larger scale:
“We were looking at renting a larger warehouse. It was going to be one big expansive space that was a hybrid of an escape room and immersive theatre: an open world explorable concept. We were developing that out for a while, and then we pivoted more towards this direction.”
Otherworld’s origins are still discernible. There are escape room elements, in the two underlying games that visitors can play. The escape room concept informed the design and shaped the experience, in that the rooms are centred around interaction.
A personal experience
The narrative element, however, has a fluidity that elevates the concept:
“It’s left open for interpretation; there are a couple of different paths that you can follow,” says Renda. “There is room for people to insert their theories about what’s going on. Generally, you won’t complete the whole experience in one visit. Your experience with the gameplay element could be very different from anyone else’s.”
The visitorship is broad:
“In the daytime, we get a lot of families, and kids’ field trips. At night, it shifts and becomes more of a date night or crowd activity. Late on Fridays and Saturdays, we’ll often have DJ events, where we’ll set up a stage in the central area of the exhibit.
“It’s a unique venue experience, too, because you’re not confined to one room. You can veer off and explore the space, then come back into the central room where all the action is happening, then break off again if you need to take a breather.”
In short:
“It’s everyone from small kids to adults. It’s all of the map.”
Haunted house meets escape room
In terms of influences, he references City Museum in St. Louis:
“We used to go there all the time when I was a kid. And then there’s TransWorld’s Halloween & Attraction show, this big haunted house escape room conference that happens in St. Louis. I’ve been going to that for almost 20 years. It was always a topic of conversation with the crew – wouldn’t it be cool to do something like this, but maybe with more themed elements – a hybrid of a museum experience mixed with a haunted house and escape room? That initial ambition morphed and transformed.”
Otherworld has brought together an amazing team of artists, builders, and innovators to make the concept a reality. The spirit of collaboration is a core part of the Otherworld ethos, with different teams working together and putting forward their ideas. Outlining the creative process, Renda says:
“There are probably around a hundred or so people involved at this point, between all the different departments.
“There is a top-down framework that we put into place, as far as establishing high-level themes, an overarching, loose narrative, and parameters to work with is concerned. It may start with a pretty rough idea. It organically morphs and transforms as it works its way through every department, from the concept artist interpreting the initial idea to the 3D modellers who model out the concept the artist drew. Then the tech team gets it, and they put their spin on it.”
Bringing the experience to life
“We don’t want it to feel like a factory,” continues Renda. “It’s flexible. You start with a plan and then it ends up taking a whole different direction, just because some cool new idea happens, or somebody throws something out there during the process. Rather than being too rigid about it, we want to make it the best experience we can. It morphs and transforms as it works its way through the pipeline.”
The small details contributed by each team come together to make one cohesive whole.
The Otherworld concept is unique among attractions, presenting a story about dreams and the subconscious. According to the narrative, Otherworld Industries tried to harness and control dreams, but the dreams were so powerful that the dream took back control and distorted reality in the waking world. For some of the most stunning rooms, the dreams have taken full control, and there is no trace of “Industries” left.
Otherworld comes to Philadelphia
Otherworld has partnered with Thirteenth Floor Entertainment Group for the eagerly anticipated Philadelphia venue. Renda explains:
“I met Chris from Thirteenth Floor back in the early haunted house days when they were getting started with their expansion. We’ve kept in touch and become friends. We always talked about doing something together, but never knew exactly what it was going to be.
“When we secured this location for Philadelphia, I presented the plan to him. He was excited about it, and they jumped on board.”
Thirteenth Floor Entertainment Group will run the location:
“They’ll be doing the marketing and the day-to-day operations after we get the doors open. Before that, our team will be designing and building it out.”
The new venue will build on the original one.
“Columbus is a great experience that has evolved and has reached a special place. But the Philadelphia venue is at a whole new level of experience. It’s going to be tricky even to compare them.
“Once you’re walking through it, it will speak for itself. There is the expansiveness of the space, for one thing. It’s a much larger footprint. Even the exhibits, the sculptures, are on a larger scale. There are multi-level climbable structures. Across the board, it’s more expansive, larger scale, and more interactive. The technology that we’ve embedded into it is much more seamless.”
Where art and technology meet
In the Philadelphia exhibit, there are over 55,000 feet of LEDs, with over 1,400,000 addressable pixels, and more than 150 projectors seamlessly integrated into the environment and controlled, in part, by the guests.
One thing that Otherworld prides itself on is the marriage of art and technology to create interactive dreamscapes. The exhibits are full of hidden sensors, such as LiDAR, and computer vision to create worlds where guests not only experience beautiful scenery but actively change it in real-time. Interacting with the exhibits reveals hidden puzzles and clues. These unlock grand payoffs and take visitors deeper into the story.
“We love creating moments of wonder where a small gesture from a child creates a room-wide light show or a group of strangers work together to solve a puzzle,” Renda comments.
The experience is driven by cutting-edge tech solutions, including holograms, holodecks, more than 150 projectors, motion tracking cameras, and over 10 km of LEDs:
“It allows us to elevate the experience. We’re able to integrate a lot that wasn’t workable the first time around.”
A new Otherworld story begins in Pennsylvania
The centrepiece of the new space is a willow tree sculpture comprising over two miles of LEDs:
“It’s abstract and ethereal,” Renda says. “It’s synched up with water and, in parallel with the audio, that single piece alone is going to be worth a visit.”
There may be, he says, a couple of rooms where something about the theming is reminiscent of the first venue in terms of continuity. But, for the most part, it’s new in every respect.
“It’s a new experience,” he says. “A totally new story.”
As far as future expansion is concerned, he explains:
“We have a few more locations in the works. Nothing is papered at this point, but we want to keep doing this, trying to raise the bar and see how crazy we can make these things. There are some other things we’re considering, including an outdoor seasonal experience we’re looking at.”
In short:
“[We have] tons of plans, tons of ideas, but at the moment our focus is on getting the doors open and showing everybody what we’ve been working on the last couple of years.”
