Is it possible to experience the success of VR's history offline experience park?

From last year to the present, apart from games and film and television, there is a field that is definitely the right direction that everyone recognizes. It is the VR offline experience.

Two days ago, The Void, the famous VR offline experience provider in the United States, opened the public VR theme park “Ghostbusters: Space of Terror” that was just opened at Madame Tussauds in New York for $50/person. . Six Flags Amusement Park in the US matches traditional roller coaster projects with Gear VR, allowing players to feel the thrill of being saved by Superman.

Ghostbusters: Terror Space

The torch I took in the game was actually a stick with a shiny ball on it. The snake that spits to us is actually more like a fan. In fact, the golden walls in the experience are only There are a few gray walls in the real world without any decoration, it is they that trapped us in a maze.

On July 1st, a few months after the "trial operation", The Void Company opened its first VR offline experience for the public at Madame Tussauds New York, USA, "Ghostbusters: Space of Terror." After paying 50 US dollars, putting on a VR headset, and carrying a backpack computer, players can turn into a "Ghostbusters" in a well-known movie, and take a proton gun into a typical New York building. And eliminate all kinds of monsters.

"Ghostbusters: Space of Terror" is a relatively short and chronological experience that allows up to three players to enter the virtual reality world together. Although not a very large virtual world, it is also interesting enough. Thanks to the helmet and the body's motion tracking points, players can see their partner in the virtual reality world, and the somatosensory vest allows players to feel feedback when they are attacked. What we experienced was absolutely eye-opening.

Technical advantages of MV offline experience

In the past 4 years, VR is definitely a hot spot in the field of technology. Companies such as Google, Facebook, Samsung, and Sony have all launched their own VR products. These VR head-up products will either use mobile phones (Samsung), or need a high-end PC, or a game console (Sony Playstation), which means basically users will play these devices at home.

Of course, there are always things that family VR entertainment can't afford, such as the free-walking of a virtual reality world in a large space, not worrying about being tripped over by a computer or head-mounted cable; experiencing the real heat of torches in front of them or experiencing them at high altitude Shuang Sui to stomach cramps. These VR experiences mentioned above are being created as VR playgrounds, exhibition projects and theme parks.

In February of this year, China’s Shanda Company will invest 350 million US dollars in the virtual reality industry, and will join forces with The Void to open the offline experience hall to China. IMAX, a world-renowned giant-screen theater supplier, also announced recently that it will cooperate with Starbreeze to build 6 VR offline experience stores by the end of this year. The theme park 6 flag has upgraded its own company's roller coaster, combining it with the virtual reality experience.

In a sense, letting people drive to an offline playground and then enter the virtual reality world sounds a little contradictory; on the other hand, it has provided users with various simulators and 4D motion seats. The playground of the chair has now added a VR head display, which looks a bit self-willed - does adding VR really improve the experience? But if these playgrounds capture the situation, the audience can experience an imaginary world - Warner and Disney have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build. For companies like The Void, VR is not a new technology, but a key element in building a new world.

The VR Park in the Last Century

Like the experience provided by The Void, people have been thinking about it long ago. In the 1990s, companies of all sizes, both large and small, tried to add a VR experience to the playground. The idea came from a long time ago.

In 1970, two 10-year-old students Jordan Weisman and Ross Babcock saw training simulation programs for the first time at the Maritime Academy in New York, USA. This costly program restored the bridge of a cruiser, mainly used for training. The student piloted the ship. For these two young people, what they saw was the form of entertainment in the future—a group of like-minded guys who, after paying the money, boarded the bridge of the spacecraft to experience.

The inspired two immediately abandoned the original plan and bought several Apple II computers to try to make the military programs they saw. "This is a good idea to make the master work bad, but we have seen a glimmer of hope in the future," recalls Weisman. However, the investors did not think so, so the two men set their dreams aside and set up FASA Corporation. They produced popular 80s board games such as MechWarrior and Shadowrun.

Eventually FASA earned enough money for two young people. Together with Babcock's veteran, the three formed Virtual World Entertainment (VWE for short), a name inspired by "virtual reality" technology in science fiction.

Virtual World produced many cockpit-like simulators with complex physical operations and placed them in a place called the "BattleTech Center," their first established in 1990 in Chicago. After seeing the introductory video outside, the visitors pay $6 to $8 to "drive" a three-story building for 10 minutes. Through the screen of the cockpit, the player will see an unparalleled alien desert, of course, only his own teammates and extraterrestrial enemies.

Although called Virtual World, but Weisman they absolutely exclude VR head. "Wearing a big, silly head on the head, and putting it in the past is bigger and more stupid. It must look like a fool in the eyes of others," Weisman said.

From the product point of view, BattleTech's products are more like a game room cabinet, rather than an experience, it is more suitable to appear in the chain game room. But one of the company’s investors is Tim Disney (a grandson of Walt Disney), so VWE wanted to create a form of entertainment that spans between high-tech games and indoor playgrounds. In 1993, the company opened a Virtual World Center in Pasadena, Los Angeles, to create a steam-punk-style paradise in the name of the fictional organization Virtual Geography.

However, in the mid-1990s, VWE was just one of the VR offline entertainment. From Sega's GameWorks to Iwerks Cinetropolis, Britain's Jonathan Waldern sells its own VR headset as an all-in-one entertainment device.

VR in Disneyland: DisneyQuest

The boss of the amusement industry, Disney also arranges its own engineering R&D team and secretly develops a “Disney-level” VR park at any cost.

With the superior display, the engineering team took a look at the film "Rocket Expert" (1991) released by the parent company, because the hero inside was wearing a helmet. In the engineer's plan, the player sits in a chair, wearing a somatosensory jacket, a leather glove without a finger, and of course, the helmet of the male actor. But at the last minute before the experience starts, they will put another helmet on the ceiling for the audience, and the latter can experience the feeling of flying. However, the project cost is at the military level, and it plans to take it for granted.

When Volkswagen actually touched Disney's VR, it would wait for a few years. By 1994, Disney's future center, Epcot Center, designed an experience area called Aladdin. The audience could bring a helmet like a crocodile mouth to experience flying. The feeling of blankets. In 1998, Disney established DisneyQuest in an Orlando park, an interactive indoor experience project in which viewers could experience projects such as “Hercules” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.” The company later opened another in Chicago.

Orlando's DisneyQuest was able to attract a steady stream of passengers, but the Chicago house was deadlocked soon after Disney closed it intending to open another in Philadelphia. At the same time, Virtual World overestimated the development of things. Their large-scale amusement parks did not attract more passengers than the small game rooms, and the operating costs were always high. Until 1999 Microsoft acquired FASA's video game control, VW was officially closed.

VR is short-lived, only due to lack of time

The fact is that that era was not a good time for any offline experience, whether VR or not. Iwerks only opened 2 Cinetropolis, because the cost is too high to close, they had planned to open 30; Sony's more cool entertainment center in San Francisco has gradually become a common exhibition hall. Dave & Busters, a chain of game rooms, operated VWE's fighting cockpit for some time, but in the end it hurt the founder's original intention - people didn't see VR as a new medium, thinking that it was nothing more than a restaurant corner item.

Decades later, whether it was BattleTech or Disney’s DisneyQuest, there were basically only half lives: the latter remained open for business 20 years after its opening; the former's fighting cockpit turned into some fanatic fans after the park was closed. Used baby. Until 2012 Oculus Rift came out to announce that VR has had new developments, and this idea is nothing new. It has been there in the past!

Dreamland - From the giant robot to the real future of the spider virtual world

The Void project evolved from the idea of ​​Bretschneider and partner Curtis Hickman's steampunk-style theme park. Originally it was to build a virtual world in a real space. By 2015, the three people had abandoned the original theme park idea and announced the development of The Void instead.

The Void is one of the first few companies in the world to develop multiplayer free walking VR theme parks. There is also Australia's Zero Latency. They will soon open an offline experience shop in Tokyo; the Landmark Group with traditional theme park experience will be Last year it announced that it will work with mainland companies to establish a large-scale VR theme park in China. In a sense, the opponents of these VR theme parks also include the traditional downstream forms of “haunted houses” and “closed rooms”.

The virtual reality combined VR should be called mixed reality. Will VR theme parks repeat the mistakes of the 1990s? Have to admit that under the current technology conditions, no matter how much cash VR company can not achieve 100% virtual reality experience. Even if it is as strong as The Void, it also finds a customized stage that connects virtual reality with the real world. For example, a switch in the virtual world, you can touch in reality; sitting in a virtual world chair, will sit in a real-world chair. In the previously mentioned "Vipered Eyes Curse" VR experience, the fog from the underground lake will also wet the player's face. When the python skips over to you, a platform under the player's feet will rise and let you Avoid python attacks.

For now and for some time to come, the VR experience will always remind us of “what we can't do in the VR world”. For example, we can experience a rough stone wall, but we can't feel the fine carvings; we can ignite the brazier's heat from the brazier, but the torch itself is not warm.

This also shows that in order to achieve a realistic experience, it is unrealistic to rely on a helmet-type only if it is not yet possible to implement the five-sense technology. What many VRs do today is nothing more than to make the old things look newer.

The Revolutionary Significance of VR for Traditional Theme Parks/Playgrounds

For virtual reality, traditional playgrounds that already have a lot of passenger traffic may have more opportunities. No matter where you are in Six Flags Land, Maryland, you can see the roller coaster of Superman - Steel Tour. This highest point was able to reach a 208-foot-high (about 62-meter-high) roller coaster built in 1999. Even more frightening is that at the lower rush point visitors will experience a feeling of dive at a steep track of 73 kilometers per hour and 68 degrees.

VR transformation of old-fashioned roller coaster

On the Six Flags roller coaster, you enter the world of Superman with a helmet, and when you rise upwards, you get the big villain Lex Luthor to the skyscraper, and Superman is playing against the robot. Afterwards, a vertically descending roller coaster track ushered in. The true 68-degree steep slope became a vertical angle of 90 degrees in the VR world, exacerbating the power of terror.

The picture you see in this VR headshot is quite general, reminiscent of a computer game 5 years ago - after all, this experience was driven by a Samsung S6 phone, which is not different from the smart machine in your pocket. . In this roller coaster, you can't give you a high-end gaming computer under the seat.

However, the relatively simple picture became very persuasive after the roller coaster began to exercise, especially the free fall and the several gravity accelerations and VR images on the back of the rollercoaster.

What VR companies are most proud of is that they can create a "presence" - allowing users to believe that they are elsewhere. One of their most common demos is to create a VR cliff. The user knows that it is fake, but the vision deceives them and makes them afraid to move forward. Adding physics can make it easier to create a sense of presence, or enhance the actual experience to achieve the same goal. The Void calls it "hyper-reality."

Commercial advantages of VR roller coaster

For theme parks, VR offers a great opportunity to turn old roller coasters into a whole new experience, without spending millions of dollars rebuilding and planning. For example, Six Flags has a 40-year-old roller coaster "The Revolution" at Los Angeles's Magic Mountain Playground. At a time when it was the tallest roller coaster in the world, it had a complete circular structure and received a design award. But within a few years, competitors have created larger products. In contrast, the current "The Revolution" looks too old.

"With VR, we can really make this old roller coaster a revolution. Since we added VR elements, the roller coaster traffic has increased three-fold," said Sam Rhodes, head of Six Flags' design department.

The theme park has been working hard for VR for some time, thanks to the generous collection of their large media company. Six Flags and Time Warner have longstanding friendships, and they teamed up against Disney and NBC Universal. VR has the potential to change the entire industry. Changing the elements of a roller coaster through VR to correspond to a newly released movie is much better than rebuilding a new project. VR can allow these old devices to bring new stimuli to tourists.

Although The Void's virtual reality experience is very good, their business model is still not established. Because it's hard to get profit just by one experience, especially when only a small group of people experience it for about 5 minutes at a time. For example, The Void charges $20 for the "Ghostbusters" VR experience at Madame Tussauds New York. Only 3 people at a time can try this 15-minute adventure. However, unlike theme parks, VR roller coasters are included in the tickets. This includes every car in each seat and is not a level in number.

The freshness that a new technology brings will disappear with the birth of the next generation of hardware, but it is difficult to simulate the discomfort of the stomach when you dive down from high altitude, or the burning sensation of the flame on the cheek. The theme park can still provide people with the most authentic experience before consumers can build a roller coaster in their own backyard or use the living room as a playroom.

Of course VR roller coasters are not without their drawbacks. When experiencing a VR roller coaster, most projects did not take into account the interaction between people. The location next to the tourists in the VR world was empty. The Void is better, allowing players to play with their friends in the VR world.

postscript

Landmark, The Void, Huayi, and popular Qitian will establish large-scale VR theme parks in China in the past two years. Disneyland has already opened in Shanghai, and Universal Studios has been established in Tongzhou, Beijing. The market popularity of theme parks is unquestionable. There is no doubt that these theme parks will be the catalysts of VR technology, allowing more ordinary consumers to experience the charm of VR technology. There is also a huge risk behind the huge opportunities. How VR companies can make rapid progress in the big waves without being shot on the beach will test everyone's strength. But those “magical rules” that allow people to experience being elsewhere will never change, and creating a high-end entertainment experience will always be a delicate technology.