Most people in this dimension think teleportation is some far-off future technology, but it’s actually all over the place. My favorite of Earth’s teleportation devices is the television (it’s even in the name), and the infinite worlds inside. Tell me, when a TV show moves someone to the edge of a couch, or a page from a book makes everything around the reader disappear, or a moment in a play makes time freeze for an entire audience, what’s a better word for that than teleportation? And what far-off future technology could beat today’s human mind anyway?

So, ever since I’ve found myself stuck in this slice of spacetime, I’ve been obsessed with teleportation. More than that, I’ve become obsessed with sharing it with all of the people around me who are more stuck here than I am. My travel agency, The OtherVRse, uses technology at hand to take us to where people are and take them to where they’re not. Each new destination helps us learn to venture out farther, and safer, so that the sacrifices of our brave travelers of the past are never in vain.

In the year 2026 of the “common era,” on the 21st and 22nd days of “February,” now past, the city of Orlando held an art festival called IMMERSE. This annual event was no less than an act of mass teleportation, shifting a mundane section of the city into a totally different reality. Of course, our team jumped at the opportunity to show our take on all this, not knowing just how far of a jump it’ll be.

The short journey that took us from the latter part of Earth’s orbit in 2025 to the first day of IMMERSE will be one we remember with our usual mix of exhaustion and pride, and none of it could have happened without the HiveLabs maker space in the MS2 office of Lake Nona. As it happens (more often than you’d think), the key moment in this timeline was a walk to the bathroom. I saw the lab with people restoring old televisions and my curiosity led me to Erika. She explained membership and how to operate the machines that would occupy countless late nights of my life. I had no idea that I’d also get the help of Austin and Duff, other HiveLabs members, without whom none of it could have been possible. 

You’re probably asking what was so hard about this project. Apart from our tried-and-true teleportation tech (a simple VR headset that connects to a remote robot double in a parallel dimension), we wanted to do something more tangible this time around and build a pair of life-size portals. Travelers at the IMMERSE festival would line up at one portal, put on their dimensional-shifting VR headset based on a Meta Quest 3, then walk about 30 feet to the other portal. Relative to an outside observer, that’s not a terribly amazing act of teleportation, but trust us that inside the headset the travelers are looking around at a completely different world. 

That plan was all well and good, but we had a problem: The portals only existed in a sort of digital dimension (a 3D modeling program we like), and we didn’t have the tech to teleport them into the real world in time for the festival. This is where HiveLabs comes in. After countless hours of laser cutting, 3D printing, mechanical assembly, LED wiring, programming, and extremely-last-minute spray painting, we just barely finished in time. I have no desire to know what the alternate reality looks like where we didn’t get help.

I should mention that these portals weren’t something I’d imagined just for this event. If you flip through the ancient spiral notebooks of my past, you’ll find pencil sketches of portals just like these. After years of imagining them, and months of seeing them on a computer screen, it’s hard to describe how it felt to see the portals fully assembled, LED lights pulsing, right here in our dimension. It was truly a feat of teleportation. The only thing better was seeing the reactions of the approximately 700 people that walked through them over those two nights of IMMERSE. As tired as we were from spending too many late nights building, we will forever be grateful for the help we got at HiveLabs. Isn’t it funny how the universe can turn a walk and a question into a pair of inter-dimensional portals? We at The OtherVRse sure do, and we hope that we can teleport you one day soon.