It’s time to boldly go to the final frontier in VR (again); a new Star Trek VR arcade game is in the works.
Star Trek: Discovery Away Mission is in development at Sandbox VR, Variety reports. In this 30 minute experience, up to six friends will investigate the icy surface of a moon in search of a lost ship. You’ll join Starfleet office Sylvia Tilly to solve problems and even engage in a few shootouts. Yes, that means you’ll wield the iconic Phaser in VR.
Sandbox is working closely with CBS on the project. There’s a teaser trailer below, though it doesn’t tell us much.
Speaking to the site, Sandbox Chief Product Officer Siqui Chen called the experience a “0.1 version of the holodeck” that Trek itself made famous. The experience will debut at Sandbox’s Hong Kong and San Francisco locations this fall before coming to new facilities in New York, Austin, San Diego and Chicago.
Sandbox’s VR arcade offering includes full-body motion capture in free-roaming VR locations. You strap markers to your body to bring your hands and feet into VR. We went hands-on with one of its original games last year, and the company’s since raised $68 million in funding.
Of course, this isn’t Star Trek’s first VR mission. A few years back Ubisoft brought us Star Trek: Bridge Crew, a cooperative multiplayer game that let teams pilot iconic vessels. We’re big fans of it, but it only offers a small slice of the wider Star Trek experience. Away Mission certainly seems to be appealing to the other side of the franchise. We’ll be interested to check it out later on in the year.
Location-based entertainment (LBE) specialist Sandbox VR has managed to grow from a single location in Hong Kong to seven locations worldwide. In January the company announced a successful investment round securing $68 million USD. Today, Sandbox VR has laid out plans for the future, with more locations planned and a new partnership with motion capture specialist Vicon.
Sandbox VR wants to use Vicon’s cameras and its location-based VR (LBVR) software Evoke to help transport up to six players into its latest VR experience Amber Sky 2088. Having previously used its own tracking solution for its first videogames and venues, Sandbox VR wanted an even more accurate system for its free-roam environments.
“Sandbox VR is expanding, and we needed a partner that can work closely with our product team,” said Steve Zhao, Sandbox VR CEO in a statement. “Being able to have quality and reliable tracking is important, but even more important is the ability for a vendor to be our partner and develop tools for us as we grow. Vicon is that company for us.”
Using Vicon’s Origin LBVR platform, Sandbox VR aims to bring Amber Sky 2088 to 12 new locations across the globe, including Austin, Macau, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Hangzhou by the end of the year, for a total of 40 new VR rooms.
“The Sandbox VR team deeply understand VR technology, but they also understand the story experience comes first,” said Alex Muir, Vicon’s Asia-Pacific Sales Manager. “If the technology takes you out of the story for one second the whole experience is ruined. I experienced this first hand in Amber Sky 2088, ultimately gripping my revolver right to the very end.”
Taking place as the 21st century draws to a close, Amber Sky 2088 is set in futuristic Hong Kong, when humanity suddenly encounters an alien invasion. Placed inside android bodies, players need to fight off the invasion using superhuman strength and skills, able to dodge bullets whilst trying to protect a mysterious package on a space elevator.
As Sandbox VR continues its expansion VRFocus will be there to bring you the latest updates.
Quite often VRFocus’ jobs section is full of vacancies for Unreal Engine developers, engineers and so forth, basically, people who know how to make videogames, preferably with some virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) experience. While this week still has those jobs, because we’ve looked at location-based entertainment (LBE) providers this time they’re also on the lookout for people who can run these centres as well.
Don’t forget, if there wasn’t anything that took your fancy this week there’s always last week’s listings on The VR Job Hubto check as well.
If you are an employer looking for someone to fill an immersive technology related role – regardless of the industry – don’t forget you can send us the lowdown on the position and we’ll be sure to feature it in that following week’s feature. Details should be sent to Peter Graham (pgraham@vrfocus.com).
We’ll see you next week on VRFocus at the usual time of 3PM (UK) for another selection of jobs from around the world.
Virtual reality (VR) location-based entertainment (LBE) can be a tricky business. Companies like The VOID and Zero Latency have seen success further expanding their global presence, while others such as IMAX VR have had to shutter operations. Sandbox VR, a Hong Kong-based provider also looks to be on the up and up, recently announcing a successful investment round securing $68 million USD.
The series A funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz reports Business Insider, with Mike Maples from Floodgate, Stanford University, TriplePoint Capital, CRCM, and Alibaba also participating.
Founded in 2016 by CEO Steve Zhao, Sandbox VR developed its own hardware and software solutions to create an out-of-home VR experience that can be fitted in shopping centres and other locations. “When we first opened in Hong Kong in 2017, when we opened the location, for the next 60 days we were sold out from morning until night,” Zhao said.
Since then Sandbox VR has managed to expand its presence to more locations in Asia as well as North America including Bangkok, Singapore, Los Angeles and San Francisco. With the new investment, the company plans further expansion, not only adding new locations but also developing new in-house experiences you can’t get anywhere else.
“We have locations planned for LA, Austin, New York, and Chicago, and we’ve inked multiple deals with Westfield malls across the country,” Zhao adds.
Sandbox VR has a number of unique VR experiences for guests to try, including; The Curse of Davy Jones where players are on the hunt for the infamous treasure of Davy Jones, Deadwood Mansion, a survival title where players have to fend off the experiments inside and find a way out. And the most recent release, Amber Sky 2088. Set in a futuristic Hong Kong, players need to escort a mysterious package via a space elevator, saving humanity from an alien invasion.
You can book a Sandbox VR experience via its official website, with each booking accepting parties from 2 to 6 people, costing $40 per person. All the videogames are completely free-roaming, with players donning backpack PC’s and supplied with gun peripherals.
As Sandbox VR continues its expansion, VRFocus will keep you updated with all the latest announcements.
The big investment deals that brought so many VR companies into the limelight have cooled down somewhat over the past two years, although that hasn’t stopped the Hong Kong-born VR destination company Sandbox VR from landing a $68 million Series A funding round.
The financing round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley-based VC firm, and includes participation by Alibaba, Floodgate Ventures, Stanford University, Triplepoint Capital, and CRCM, Business Insiderreports.
Unlike The Void, Sandbox VR hasn’t publicly announced any deals for branded VR experiences, instead making its own VR games including a futuristic shooter, a haunted house, and an underwater treasure hunting adventure. All of these support between two and six players at once, with the company charging around $40 per person for a 30-minute playsession.
The company’s approach is decidedly different from The Void, which features large-scale tracking volumes, interactive sets, and real-time effects. Instead, Sandbox VR is focusing on greater scalablity thanks to reduced complexity and physical footprint.
“We tried everything, what we really liked about [Sandbox] was that really though about archetyping this as modest-sized rooms that you could really put anywhere,” Andreessen Horowitz’s Andrew Chen tells TechCrunch. “So it’s this really scalable thing that you could imagine putting inside of a mall or a boutique retail location. You could scale a single location to having 10 or 20 rooms the way a movie theater might have 12 screens.”
Sandbox VR is currently operating seven locations across North America and Asia. More locations are planned for Los Angeles, Austin, New York, and Chicago. Sandbox VR founder Steve Zhao says the company has “inked multiple deals with Westfield malls across the country.”
Das VR-Start-up Sandbox VR betreibt eine VR-Arcade und kämpfte lange Zeit um die Sicherung der eigenen Existenz. Nun konnte sich das Unternehmen in einer ersten Finanzierungsrunde Gelder in Höhe von 68 Millionen US-Dollar sichern für ein Arcade-Komplettpaket mit Vollversorgung zur Bereitstellung von Multiplayer-VR-Erfahrungen. Dazu zählen Vertrieb, Technologie und Content. Grund dafür ist ein virales Facebook-Video, welches genug Aufmerksamkeit für die VR-Visionäre erzeugte.
Sandbox VR – VR-Startup erhält 68 Millionen US-Dollar in einer ersten Finanzierungsrunde
Steve Zhao, CEO und Co-Gründer des chinesischen Start-ups Sandbox VR arbeitete lange Zeit als Spieleentwickler in seinem Unternehmen Blue Tea Games und veröffentlichte zahlreiche PC-Videospiele (z. B. Dark Parables) für den Markt. Doch die Industrie veränderte sich und somit auch das Interesse an den Spieletiteln des Studios.
Im Jahr 2015 entdeckte er die VR-Industrie mit seiner zukunftsträchtigen Technologie und den immersiven Möglichkeiten des neuen Mediums. Mit visionärem Gründergeist packte er all seinen Mut zusammen und gründete das Studio GloStation mit dem Ziel, das Holodeck in die Realität umzusetzen. Doch der Markt entwickelte sich nur langsam, und als 2016 die Oculus Rift und HTC Vive offiziell erhältlich wurden, musste ein Ersatzplan zur Überbrückung her.
So arbeitete das Team zunächst an einem VR-Spiel, um sich über Wasser zu halten. Leider nur mit mäßigem Erfolg, denn auch wenn das Spiel sich gut verkaufte, zehrte die Entwicklung dennoch 80 % des bestehenden Budgets auf. Eine Summe, welche durch die spärlichen Käufe im kleinen VR-Markt kaum aufzuheben war. Und der Traum des Holodecks bestand weiter.
Image courtesy: Sandbox VR
Also zurück zu den Wurzeln und der Entwicklung einer Arcade-Einrichtung, welche diesem Wunsch deutlich näherkommt. Mit kaum Kapital in den Taschen und einer spärlichen Demo-Version einer VR-Erfahrung begann das Klinkenputzen im Jahr 2017, um Investoren für das ambitionierte Projekt zu gewinnen. Nach vielen Rückschlägen setzte er alles auf eine Karte, investierte seine gesamten finanziellen Rücklagen in das neue Projekt Sandbox VR und arbeitete mit seinem Team über Monate hinweg ohne Pause auf Hochtouren, um seinen Traum zu verwirklichen.
Mit der Existenzangst im Nacken entwickelten sie in kürzester Zeit die erste VR-Sandbox für Arcades und öffneten daraufhin die Tore ihrer Arcade-Einrichtung. Doch das Interesse blieb aus und die Zeit lief den Devs davon – bis sich eines Tages alles dank eines viralen Facebook-Videos ändern sollte.
Eines Morgens wurde das besagte Video über 10.000 Mal geteilt, die Arcade wurde für Monate hinweg ausgebucht und das Interesse am Produkt stieg ins Unermessliche. Die Investoren klingelten dank der medialen Aufmerksamkeit sturm bei den Verantwortlichen und nun wurde die erste Finanzierungsrunde mit einem Investment in Höhe von 68 Millionen US-Dollar gesichert. Geleitet wurde das Ganze vom Risikokapitalunternehmen Andreessen Horowitz, zu den Investoren zählen unter anderem Floodgate, die Stanford University und Alibaba.
Dank dieser harten Zeit und dem stetigen Willen nicht aufzugeben, gesellt sich Sandbox VR nun im Arcade-Markt an die Seite von großen Einrichtungen, wie The Void und Dreamscape Immersive. Wir dürfen gespannt sein, wie sich das ambitionierte Projekt in Zukunft entwickeln wird.
VR startup Sandbox VR raised a $68 million Series A round of investment led by Andreessen Horowitz.
A blog post from CEO and co-founder Steve Zhao outlines how he gave the company six months of runway by taking “my entire nest-egg — all the money I had squirreled away from my time building Blue Tea Games over the last decade — and I invested its entirety into Sandbox VR.” GloStation (later becoming Sandbox VR) opened in June 2017 in Hong Kong and Zhao wrote that bookings were slow until a video on Facebook featuring the experience was shared thousands of times.
Then, the phone “wouldn’t stop ringing” and they were suddenly booked “3 months straight.” That helped them raise $3 million led by Alibaba. Andreessen Horowitz general partner Andrew Chen wrote in a post “after our initial meeting with the team, the entire investment partnership at Andreessen Horowitz went to try out the experience together, and after nearly an hour of shooting zombies, dodging lasers, and solving puzzles, we were blown away by the experience!”
The pitch is that Sandbox VR is developing a “triumvirate of distribution, technology, and content starting with a network of high-end retail locations that combines premium hardware, motion capture technology, and a low-latency software stack to deliver a social multiplayer experience.”
Last year games editor David Jagneaux tried the experience and found it “fun and adaptable in a way that I could see this sort of content easily scaling throughout malls, theme parks, and other locations with the foot traffic to support it.”
We confirmed the company is planning to launch in more than half a dozen locations including Los Angeles, Austin, Chicago, and New York.
When I first tried The Void’s Star Wars installation at Disney World earlier this year, it totally blew me away. I loved how intricately detailed the in-game environment was and that it was mapped to the real world so I could freely move around and reach out to touch walls, levers, and buttons on panels. It was amazing, but scaling that business to more than just a handful of locations isn’t going to be easy. It requires significant space and careful mapping.
Sandbox VR, another, similar, location-based VR gaming space, recently opened up a location at the Hillsdale Shopping Center in San Mateo, CA with an excellent storefront display right next to one of the main mall entrances. All they need a is a large green room and the software does the rest. The Sandbox VR website also lists locations in Los Angeles, New York, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
What I played was extremely fun and adaptable in a way that I could see this sort of content easily scaling throughout malls, theme parks, and other locations with the foot traffic to support it.
You can see some example footage of the experience above. Everyone that does a Sandbox VR sessions is given digital copies of this mixed reality footage. They even show you the footage immediately after you’re done using an iPad. The cameras are all set up to record and process the video seamlessly, making it extremely easy to watch and share.
As great as The Void was, they don’t have anything like this in place which feels like a major missed opportunity. All they have you do instead is take a regular photo wearing the gear afterwards, but it lacks the mixed reality flair. The setup at Sandbox uses a mixture of HTC Vive Pro headsets, tracked rifles, backpack PCs, haptic feedback vests, and sensors on your wrists and ankles for full-body tracking.
In terms of content, Sandbox VR currently has two experiences as of the time of this writing. The first and most popular one is a standard zombie wave shooter. The games are designed for 4-6 people (they’ve got an even larger room next to the one I played in) but we did it as a pair of just two. You’ll stand inside the box and gun down waves upon waves of undead. Some of them stumble/walk slowly, some run at you, and some of them even climb along the walls and try to incapacitate you with disgustingly long tongues.
It’s fun and it does a good job of introducing the mechanics of using the gun controller and getting comfortable with moving around the space, but it’s pretty basic. If you’ve played The Brookhaven Experiment, HordeZ, Arizona Sunshine, or any countless other zombie shooters then you’ve already played something better to be honest. However, the second game I tried is what really blew me away.
The folks at Sandbox VR didn’t send footage of my time in this one, but basically it’s a Davy Jones-themed cursed pirate ship adventure. You can see some clips directly above right here in the official trailer. Instead of rifles we used flintlock-style pistols and had to fend off waves of an undead pirate crew. The variety in this first scene was already much better as some enemies threw weapons at us, some had swords, and they all moved at various speeds.
Once clearing them out we went down below the deck to a brand new environment where we had to fight off new enemies then solve a puzzle. Each of us had to stand on two buttons at opposite ends of the space and then toss a VR-tracked foam stick (a torch in the game) to light fires. Actually tossing a physical object to my partner, in real-time, inside VR, was really surreal.
The pirate game also had two boss fights. First up was a giant, blind ghost that stumbled around the play space aimlessly trying to catch us. We had to flee by physically running around the room and not bumping into him or each other. That’s easily the fastest I’ve ever moved while in VR and I never once worried about slamming into the wall or tripping over something.
Finally, the grand finale of the game was a boss fight against a giant squid-like monster. We had to dodge laser beams while fighting waves of undead monsters and then using the torch to light the canon and fire off shots to take him down. It was an incredibly fast-paced and dynamic fight that really took advantage of the space, forcing us to constantly move and communicate.
Sandbox VR has a variety of locations you can see on the official website as well as details about opening your own location. A third, sci-fi themed experience is reportedly on the way soon. Let us know what you think from what you’ve seen here down in the comments below!
