“On the bone,” the man corrects me, thumbing my ear. “It goes on the bone. It’s a bone conduction headset.” He places a thin black frame along the back of my neck, with a small transducer resting on either cheekbone. The transducer will transmit sounds through my bones and into my cochlea, bypassing my eardrum and making standard headphones completely unnecessary. What is the thinking behind this? 

“Well, there are sounds all around you in the room, so you’ll need to hear them too,” says the man. “Or maybe you’ll need to scratch your ear. You don’t have a pacemaker, do you? Or any titanium in your head?” 

The Vikings Immersive exhibition in Canada Water is the latest interactive show to open in a large barn in an unhospitable part of London. From somewhere within the building there is a deep bellow, which tickles my jaw and can also be heard in the toilet and gift shop. Generally, though, the show foregoes the “marauding-hordes” image of the legendary people. Instead we follow the story of Kraka, daughter of Brunehilde and wife of King Ragnar Lodbrook, who sacked Paris. In the legend, Kraka lived in disguise as a peasant until she won King Ragnar’s hand by cleverly solving his impossible riddle, and as queen her prophetic visions guided her husband’s conquests. You can ask the wise queen questions through interactive screens on the wall –though at 10.30am on opening day there are a few technical hitches, which is to be expected, and the Kraka I talk to is silent, her eyes sliding side to side. 

But first, into the “life size forest”, a vast green space at the start of the show adorned with real trees. In the middle are two dozen tree stumps, each covered with an individual faux-fur pelt and a VR headset, with its own standard earphones attached. I sit on my pelt under the Tree of Knowledge, eager to hear the story of Kraka, with the audioguide round my neck, my bone conductors on my jaws, my standard headphones on my ears, the VR headset on my face and my mobile phone in my hand to write my notes. 

Within my headset, confronting me in virtual reality, is someone called Sigmund the Dragon Slayer, and next to him, a man is lashed to a tree. I discover that my tree stump will spin 360, so I propel myself round with my heels to see the whole forest. I am recovering from a heavy night out on Monday, and the effect is intense: more so when the scene changes to the aerial view of a burning castle. Then I am on a boat with the King of the Norsemen. I spin my stump again, and see, directly behind me and close enough to touch, a Norse sailor, shaven headed and oafish, oddly impaired, his mouth muttering and his legs restless. The visions fade, and the headset part of the show is now at an end.

Vikings Immersive is largely a display of rousing, moving images transmitted with cutting edge technology, a new experience for someone like me accustomed to learning about the Vikings via animatronic figures stirring fibreglass stew in a bowl. There are a few old-fashioned, 3D artefacts on stands, like a collection of Viking knots, and some information about the Goddess Frigg. And there’s that bellowing again, which seems to be coming from behind the double doors. 

The action is beamed on the walls of a large room this time, as you sit together in another Viking longship; a soundtrack of fine Celtic fiddle plays, which sounds a little too modern for the Vikings, who were likely only to have managed limited scales on their pipes and horns. Then King Ragnor is gone, and Kraka is leading an army (hence the bellowing). Whether she ever did this in real life is questionable. Heavy metal chords play, and runes fall from the sky. At the end of the show, her son, Ivar the Boneless, leads an army to Britain. At this point I need to scratch my ear – and it’s true, it’s very easy to do.

I’m not sure I learned anything new about the Vikings in Canada Water, though the six other people in the longboat with me enjoyed filming the wall projections on their mobile phones. I left through the shop, and my bone conductors vibrated at the door to warn staff that someone might be trying to steal them. From deep inside the building, I could hear Kraka’s wedding starting up again.

[Further reading: The perils of adapting Kazuo Ishiguro]

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