Remote Adventures

Hola, Product Hunt! 👋🏽 In mid-February, I launched an escape room venue in Orlando. Roughly four weeks later, we went into COVID-19 lockdown. My team and I started noticing remote/virtual escape room offerings that were just Zoom calls where players direct a game master to look at/interact with things in a physical space. We liked the idea of playing with a real environment from home, but wanted to give players direct control over the environment. Paranormal Panic is our first stab at a remotely playable escape room. Players have 30 minutes to catch a ghost, and must work together as two squads. Each team connects with a separate device (laptop, desktop, or tablet), and although they have live video feeds from the same room, they see different angles inside it. They also have control over different equipment, and have different information on their control panels. It's built using Vue, Websockets, Jitsi, Raspberry Pi HQ cameras, and Python. We got lucky that escape rooms are a reasonably safe entertainment option (gatherings of eight or less, no strangers, sanitized, etc.) during these times, so we're fortunate to have reopened and are seeing good attendance. That said, we hope these remote experiences (esp. as team building events) will be a good supplement to our in-person business. We're developing a few other remote experiences that are more ambitious, and we expect to have them ready soon. Here's a teaser video: