SeaWorld Orlando ditching VR on Kracken

[BoddaH1994]

How many of you got to experience it?

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/tourism/os-bz-seaworld-kraken-vr-20180917-story.html

[SonofBaconator]

The VR was very synched with the ride perfectly until the break run, at least that's what I've noticed when I saw the povs. I think VR only works on rides that have no MCBR.

[Kenban]

I have been on it three times with the VR.  I cannot say I will miss it.  It synced well for me but I always heard a few people on the train complain it never showed movement and were stuck at the intro for the whole ride.

It ruined the capacity of the ride, and with the reservation system which the average out of town guest never bothered to figure out, it left a lot of unhappy travelers.  With the ride taking 5+ minutes to load and running a single train it might have been able to dispatch 10 trains an hour, that’s a total of 320 people an hour, and from what I witnessed even that is likely high.

[BoddaH1994]

Here are my thoughts:

1stly, many people have stated that no matter how cool Kracken Unleashed was, it wasn't worth sacrificing the actual ride experience and/or the accessibility of the ride for

Secondly, if any of you have ridden that and the sims at Universal and other places down there, they feel kind of the same.  It essentially shows how good the simulators have become, so trading in the $20+ million for a B&M plus the cost of VR isn't worth the trade off for "another simulator experience."

For those who haven't done it, I can tell you that the experience is much better than Iron Dragon's.  These VR headsets have a very dynamic range while Iron Dragon's is a consumer thing that runs off of a Galaxy s5 (which works shockingly well, all things considered).  Kracken was richer and had much better head tracking.  Both are pretty good experiences, but the cost difference with Kracken is very apparent.

Overall, I'm glad I got to experience it, but I'm not all that sad to see it go.

[homestar92]

When I went to the park, I went directly to Kraken right at opening so I was able to ride it both ways with minimal wait. Their headsets did not fit over glasses, so being very nearly legally blind, I wasn't able to enjoy the ride at all with the VR. The focusing mechanism mitigates this a little, but my eyesight is really bad and my two eyes are not equal. Their system just couldn't accommodate bad vision at all. So maybe my frustrations left me a bit biased, but I think the ride is better without VR and it certainly wasn't worth killing the capacity like it did. I'm not upset to see that feature gone.