I’m in a helicopter flying high above New York City. A gust of wind from the chopper’s engine blows hair in my face and the sound of the rotors is deafening. A thousand feet below me is Times Square, and the thought of falling is making my stomach flip.And then … I remove my virtual reality (VR) headset and come back to earth with a bump. I’m in a room not much bigger than a cupboard, in a cemetery in east London.This is multi-sensory cinema, or “the feelies” as its creators like to call it – a movie screening tailored to stimulate the viewer’s senses of touch, taste, smell and movement. The phrase was coined by the English author Aldous Huxley, who, in his dystopian novel Brave New World, predicted the advent of real-time sensory cinema – the logical progression from the two dimensional “talkies” that defined cinema for much of the 20th century.
formerly Mad Cornish Projectionist.