You can now slide around the Shard... in virtual reality

If you've ever wished that London’s tallest building was a giant helter-skelter, today is — almost — your lucky day.

Visitors to the Shard’s 72nd floor can don virtual-reality goggles and hurtle at 100mph along imaginary open-air tubes that corkscrew around the skyscraper.

To “fool the senses”, guests sit on a sloped platform that moves beneath them. Organisers said the Slide experience, which lasts two minutes, “answers the call of Londoners to turn the Shard into a helter-skelter” — and will give the 178-metre-high Orbit slide in Stratford’s Olympic Park a run for its money.

It is one of two VR experiences introduced by The View From The Shard, the tourist attraction, at its Skydeck.

The second, Vertigo, gives visitors the sensation of tip-toeing across girders in the sky as the tower is built. Whereas the Slide uses an Oculus Rift headset, for the Vertigo experience guests don a different device, HTC Vive, and have sensors strapped to their legs. This allows staff to track visitors as they “walk” around the virtual construction site. Both experiences trick guests by blowing fresh air at them.

The VR experiences were created by two east London firms, Inition and Happy Finish. The latter’s chief interactive officer, Daniel Cheetham, said: “We can now use virtual reality to totally immerse someone in an experience that would have previously only been available to the imagination.