As VR Gaming Looks for New Footing, the Out-of-Home XR Entertainment Space is

What the report says

The investment and development community are constantly striving to find the next profitable sector in XR, turning to new business opportunities following a turbulent time in the consumer VR gaming space. One area of interest is in out-of-home XR attractions, known widely in the industry as Location-Based Entertainment (LBE) XR. The sector deploys XR as a B2B2C business model that aims to surpass expectations of consumer gaming, presenting XR technology to a wider audience.Guest Article By Kevin WilliamsKevin Williams is a specialist in the immersive location-based entertainment sector, with a long history of development, application, and commentary on the international industry.

Along with running his consultancy KWP, working with leaders in the sector, he also is a prolific writer, publishing his own news service on the sector the Stinger Report, and podcast, SoundOff covering trends in the market. He also presents keynotes at numerous conferences on the deployment and application of immersive tech in the out-of-home entertainment sector, and the growth in social entertainment.Out-of-home XR applications are now seen as revenue vehicles for prominent Intellectual Properties (IP) to reach new audiences. The latest generation of VR free-roaming arena systems offer players premium experiences within high-end virtual recreations of popular properties.

Recently announced, Jumanji: The Lost Levels has been developed by Zero Latency in collaboration with Sony Pictures. The premium VR experience will go live across over 170 venues in December this year. This new IP-based property and other games for these systems focus on the social experience, rather than just blasting zombies.Another VR free-roaming arena developer is Sandbox VR has grown to some 90 venues internationally. Sandbox is the second largest of the standalone franchise operations. In these VR experiences, groups of six players don both VR headsets and haptic vests within an arena which includes added environmental effects.

Key details

The company has a selection of VR experiences, some including high profile IP-based content such as their popular Squid Game Virtual, developed in partnership with Netflix, along with Stranger Things: Catalyst. Both place guests in virtual recreations of elements from the popular series. Road to VR‘s Ben Lang wrote last year about his first-hand experience inside of Squid Game Virtual and other Sandbox experiences. The next generation of VR free-roaming experiences are moving from small handfuls of players to audiences of 20 or even 40 at a time, which have been described as ‘Virtual Adventure’ systems.

Audiences traverse recreations of historical environments such as ancient Rome, climb the Pyramids, or navigate the Titanic. One example of the virtual adventure approach has been developed by the VR studio Univrse in partnership with Banijay Live Studio. The Black Mirror Experience is a travelling 50-minute hybrid adventure within the dystopia environment from the original television series that came from both Channel 4 and was screened on Netflix.The growth of investment in LBE XR was seen during this years’ Augmented World Expo (AWE), held in Long Beach, California during June. Which included a new LBE XR Zone on the show floor, and a dedicated seminar program where developers and investors attended to scope out this emergent opportunity.The seminar covered developers in this sector of the market like The Rabbit Hole VR, which worked with developer vrCAVE to offer its latest multiplayer VR free-roaming escape game Cyberscape, where players work together as teams in a compelling escape game experience.

Hololabs Studio is another developer of standalone VR free-roam games and recently launched their new experience called Abyss Vault in partnership with Synthesis VR who is a major content distributor and platform developer. Meanwhile, developers such as Octopod VR and Vertigo Games have worked to position some existing consumer VR content into the VR arcade space.Experiences in the LBE XR scene employ share many design considerations seen in the broader theme park and attraction market. Developer Thousand Bit has created Sinister Inn, which has been called “the World’s first Haunted Walkthrough VR attraction.” The concept mixes elements from traditional horror attractions with a portable VR configuration, making an attractive package which requires significantly less physical infrastructure and actor talent compared to a more traditional horror attraction.LBE XR has plenty of overlap with consumer XR, but diverges in some interesting ways, especially when it comes to VR headsets.

More from the announcement

While Meta Ques has long dominated the consumer headset market, many VR entertainment applications are adopting new PICO 4 Ultra VR headset. It has becoming a workhorse system across the industry, thanks to its LBE-focused service, support, and swappable battery.