Went to SF’s new virtual Yosemite. It was a dump.

That’s what I learned on a recent reluctant trip to the tourist magnet that is Ghirardelli Square to try “Experience Yosemite,” a virtual reality gimmick that bills itself as “San Francisco’s best cinematic experience.” !” (exclamation point included).

Strangely, no one wants to see this superlative offer when I arrive at GamedayVR on a Friday afternoon. The cavernous warehouse is completely deserted except for the single employee, whose head is buried in his smartphone. Inside the space are more than a dozen egg-shaped chairs with plush red lining, an unexplained NASA spacesuit, and two billboards for “Experience Yosemite,” the one with the unawarded “Best Cinematic Experience”! quote and another that calls it “the future of cinema”.

I realize my experience of the “future of cinema” and I am escorted to my virtual reality chair. The schoolboy who takes care of it tells me not to put my backpack against the egg because it will move. (Spoiler: It ends up moving very, very, very little, dear reader.)

I sink into the comfortable egg chair and put on my virtual reality headset. For the next 15 minutes, I am subjected to one of the saddest cinematic experiences of my life.

It’s even hard to explain how bad the graphics of “Experience Yosemite” are. They look somewhere between 1992’s Wolfenstein 3D and 1993’s Myst – two early computer games that were fun despite their 30-year-old crude 3D graphics. You’ll enjoy it as your egg tilts back and forth slightly every so often, giving you a slow-motion version of one of those plastic horses outside the grocery store that you pay a quarter for ascend.

I first thought it would be something like one of Oculus’ “Star Wars” games, where you can interact and move freely in an incredibly cool environment, but it’s by no means like that . Instead, you’re just watching a sad Yosemite movie where you can turn slightly left and right to see a bit more of the screen.

Not only is the film sad, however; it is also extremely confusing. It jumps from John Muir touring Yosemite with Theodore Roosevelt in 1903 (you watch a meeting around a campfire between them where they don’t move), to Native American history with the land (you find yourself in a dark cave for a good three minutes, and the screen repeatedly shows different baskets), to free solo climber Alex Honnold scaling Yosemite’s 3,200-foot El Capitan without a rope in 2017, to Ansel Adams taking photos there in 1958 There’s no timeline to any of this, and probably the most dramatic moment of it all is when Adams uses a red filter for a shot of El Capitan instead of a yellow. There’s also a really special moment where the movie shows a popular slackline spot, and the woman on the slackline somehow looks worse than Meta’s legless VR people.

Several times over the 15 minutes, I can also hear people slamming car doors in real life in Ghirardelli Square – because of course I can.

The only silver lining to all of this is that the filmmakers somehow convinced Bryan Cranston to do the voiceover.

“Experience Yosemite” is only $10 less than the Yosemite National Park entry fee for a single car ($35) if you go alone, and hilariously, there’s a free site called virtualyosemite.org that’s somehow a better world than this abomination. If you’re a tourist visiting San Francisco and wondering if this experience is worth spending $25 for each member of your family, no, it’s not.

May I suggest instead that I do what I did after I finished submitting to it: I went to Buena Vista Cafe, which is on the same block, and enjoyed a coffee non-virtual Irish, unequivocally one of the best experiences in San Francisco.