After watching a couple of haunted-house movies it really struck me how low-tech haunted houses are, even today. Some pneumatics, synchronized event timers, things like that are about the limit of what is in use. Here I will daydream a little about how higher technology could make for some richer haunting experiences. Most of what I discuss below is within today's technology, its just prohibitively expensive.
On the other hand, in the early 1990's I was talking about putting two soundblaster cards in a computer to play Doom, so you could have 4 speakers and hear the monsters sneaking up behind you. Today one of the hottest technologies is "positional audio" where the sound card either supports 4 speakers or simulates 4 speakers with 2 so you can "hear the monsters sneaking up behind you"....so perhaps I'm just a bit ahead of my time...
Imagine a mirror that when you look into it, you see yourself in an alternate reality, or perhaps an altered version of yourself. Its possible... imagine a flatscreen computer monitor in a mirror frame. A video camera just below the screen captures the scene in realtime and shows it on the monitor. While interesting, that's not very scary and would end up looking like the video camera monitors at the electronics store. But, suppose you linked a positional radar system to the camera, the computer could calculate where you are and what angle you are looking at the "mirror" at, then the video camera points in the appropriate direction you could simulate an actual mirror. For example, if you are to the left of a real mirror and look in it, you see a reflection of what is to your right. By having the camera point in the correct direction to the right you can simulate a real mirror. In fact it would probably really be taken for a mirror unless very closely checked.
Once you've got people believing its a real mirror then you can start having fun... for example, you can use the computer power to "add" a ghostly image to one corner of the reflected room, or alter the reflection of the person when they are in the image. You can even subtly alter the "room" itself with some decent programming.
Think how unsettling it would be to see a mirror in a room, go over to look at yourself in it and see a Vampire right behind you. You spin around but nothing is there, however by sneaking a peek in the mirror you see him again!
Using a positional radar-like system, so the computer knows where in the room the closest person is, it should be pretty easy to add a motor to a gargoyles head so it turns. Then with an appropriate computer control, you could have several gargoyles or statues in a room and each slowly turns its head to look at the person or whoever is closest. The effect might not even be noticed for a minute or two but would be very unnerving once it was.
I was thinking about mikes and speakers in cell phones the other day and was wondering just how small they can get. If you can get a speaker about the size of a grain of rice then you could have some fun with people. I imagined a room with a "speaker" hanging down on a tiny wire to just above head height or even below head height. If they were placed every square foot or so and then connected to a computer, you could start to do some cool things with audio.
Since the sound actually comes from the tiny speakers all over the room you can do positional sound easily. Flapping bats that move around the darkened room, whispers that are always behind you, faint moans that stop when you come close (by utilizing the positional radar again), all sorts of things are possible.
I don't have any idea how much they cost but I have seen large plates of LCD display. Imagine the whole floor covered in a giant LCD display with decent resolution, now you can have some fun.
With some appropriate programming and that positional radar again, you could have a room filled with roaches. The roaches are programmed to move away from the feet when the person walks around the room otherwise the illusion would be shattered when you don't crunch roaches underfoot. But the effect would be extremely creepy, a room filled with thousands of roaches crawling around the floor, scattering from where you step or bend down....ugh!
I watched the "Haunting" remake and one of the cool effects was the face of a child inside a billowing curtain... I was thinking how unsettling it would be to see that for real and I think it could be done relatively easily.
By building a section of wall out of hundreds of small air tubes, about the size of a aquarium air tube, all stuck together to form a matrix and some form of air-valve controller for each one, say a high pressure tube in the back and a box with tiny computer controlled valves for each tube. With a setup like this you can create "shapes" out of air pressure.
By using low pressure on some tubes and higher pressure on others you can force the curtain to billow out a large amount or a small amount, it would be like selecting a bright dot or a dim dot for each pixel in an image, the resultant "image" of the curtain billowing out would give any shape you wanted.
If you had a wall of them, then the images could move around as the various tubes changed air pressure, or evolved..starting out as a child and evolving into a giant demon-head that dissapears (all valves shut off and curtain falls back to normal) if a customer gets close.
Another variation on the DropDown Speakers and Roach Floor could be the Mouse Floor. In this one, the speakers are embedded in the floor every inch or so in a grid pattern. With appropriate computer control a couple of sound effects, you could have mice or small animals scurrying around the floor.
Imagine walking along and you "hear" behind you several tiny feet scampering from one end of the room to the other, you spin around but nothing is there, then behind you but just at your feet you hear it again, you jump around but again nothing is there.
These last couple of ideas, I don't know if the technology is there yet or not...but it seems hard to believe in today's world of audio and visual that you can't simulate a bottomless pit. Not one of the ones with a mirror on top and bottom, I'm talking about a rickety old dangerous bridge over a 10 foot wide span that "feels" bottomless. I know the audio guys can already do tricks by canceling existing sound on the fly with real-time reverse wafeform generators and then playing back the original sound with different delays and frequencies to make the sound move around, they could make it sounds like a bottomless pit...I'm sure the visual guys could do something similar to make it truly "feel" like its a 20000 foot drop right below you.
This one is just a fancy idea but it would sure spook the heck out of someone. I know they already look into the eyeball on fighter planes to see where the pilot is looking, imagine extending that to a room. If the computer could "know" where the person is looking then you could make things happen. Imagine a room where no matter where you looked you always saw "something" out of the corner of your eye, something moving, say a face in a curtain, but whenever you looked straight at it, it was gone, but then somewhere else you saw movement out of the corner of your eye.
I bet people would run screaming from a room like that in a matter of minutes!
Oh well, just some ideas about how computers and technology might help haunting. Most of them are for enhancing the "atmosphere" of a haunt rather than the actual "scare" itself.
Any more ideas? Write me, I'd love to hear about them and put them in the space below: