Space Pirate Arena is an upcoming pseudo-sequel to VR classic Space Pirate Trainer (2017). All your training, it seems, was leading up to going head to head against other players in a huge virtual arena… and you’ll need an equally huge playspace in real life to play.
Space Pirate Trainer from developer I-Illusions was one of VR’s first killer apps, and after all these years it’ll soon be getting a follow-up in the form of Space Pirate Arena.
I-Illusions developer Dirk Van Welden said recently that the game will launch “soon” on Quest, and he confirmed the game will require a whopping 32 × 32ft (10 × 10m) playspace.
I would try to find a large space somewhere in the next couple of months, because Arena mode is coming to Quest this year! #SPTDXpic.twitter.com/jqQaXgtLaF
The reason for the huge playspace requirement is because the game will put players inside of a virtual arena that they must navigate entirely with real movement. While the virtual arena has lots of corridors and cover to hide behind, players will of course just be running around an empty space trying to spot each other (which can look pretty hilarious from the outside).
Given the playspace requirement, the game is almost certain to not launch on any tethered headsets since their cords wouldn’t reach far enough to cover the arena.
Van Welden acknowledges that the huge playspace requirement isn’t going to be something everyone will have access to, but says it’s necessary if you want to play Space Pirate Arena “the way it should be.”
In a lot of ways, this feels similar to releasing Space Pirate Trainer [early access] back in 2016. Back then we didn’t know if people would go out and buy a VR headset. There are a lot of Quests out there now, but we’re asking those people to find a safe 10 × 10m spot to play Arena. Similar to SPT, once you have played Arena the way it should be, you’ll be introduced to a whole new kind of experience, and it’ll just sell itself.
To make sure Arena is played the right way, it won’t boot unless you found a 10 × 10m space. That’s actually the only threshold, since we’ve added a single player mode to give you a taste of the gameplay. (If you don’t have friends with a Quest). In the process of creating Arena, we had to come up with a whole bunch of original solutions for problems that arise with 1-to-1 movement based gameplay. Let’s hope these set the bar for future similar experiences.
He goes on to say that the studio is in its “final push” of development, and that a release date announcement and more details are due “very soon,” so it seems that we can expect a launch before year’s end.
Back in 2016 when virtual reality (VR) began to find its way into consumers hands one of the most popular shooters at that time was I-Illusions’ Space Pirate Trainer. A few years later in 2019, the studio announced a grander vision for the franchise, a far more open laser-tag style experience called Space Pirate Arena. This week I-Illusions has confirmed that Space Pirate Arena will be hitting Oculus Quest soon.
Rather than your basic living room roomscale VR experience where you might have two or three meters each way to play with, Space Pirate Arena commands a far larger area. As I-Illusions’ Dirk Van Welden reveals in a Twitter thread: “To make sure Arena is played the right way, it won’t boot unless you found a 10 x 10m space. That’s actually the only threshold”
So you’ll need a decent garden area, sports court or field before you can even begin to play. With all that space to play in you and a few mates with Oculus Quests will be able to run around virtual arenas, hiding behind any available cover. “In the process of creating Arena, we had to come up with a whole bunch of original solutions for problems that arise with 1-to-1 movement based gameplay. Let’s hope these set the bar for future similar experiences!” Van Welden adds.
While Space Pirate Arena is primarily designed as a local multiplayer shooter Van Welden has confirmed it’ll feature a multiplayer element. It’s there to give you a taste of the gameplay if you don’t have friends with a Quest. “Similar to SPT, once you have played Arena the way it should be, you’ll be introduced to a whole new kind of experience, and it’ll just sell itself,” he notes.
Space Pirate Trainer
There’s still plenty to be revealed including player count, weapons, arena variety and quite what the technical requirements will be for connecting multiple headsets when you’re stood in the middle of a basketball court, or in the middle of a field?
Space Pirate Arena is certainly one of the more interesting uses of VR for general consumers. When launch date details are revealed, VRFocus will let you know.
Space Pirate Arena is coming to Oculus Quest and that means it is time to find a bigger play space.
Dirk Van Welden of I-Illusions shared a few details about the release of the upcoming arena-scale sequel to the defining wave shooter of consumer VR’s first generation. Space Pirate Arena, of course, is the follow-on to 2016’s Space Pirate Trainer and it takes the game fully multiplayer with intense competitive matches that require some of the largest VR play areas we’ve ever seen.
The sequel was first revealed in 2019 and has been teased a few times since then, but it’s been held back by the size of the play spaces allowed by the Oculus Quest system. Earlier this summer Facebook confirmed to UploadVR it expanded the maximum play area on Quest up to a staggering 15 meters in either direction. Space Pirate Arena requires a safe space of at least 10 meters in either direction, and Van Welden noted the game now includes a single-player mode if you don’t have a friend with another Quest.
Put another way, all systems are pretty much go for the launch of arena-scale Oculus Quest gameplay.
“In a lot of ways, this feels similar to releasing Space Pirate Trainer back in 2016. Back then we didn’t know if people would go out and buy a VR headset. There are a lot of Quests out there now, but we’re asking those people to find a safe 10x10m spot to play Arena,” Van Welden wrote on Twitter. “Similar to SPT, once you have played Arena the way it should be, you’ll be introduced to a whole new kind of experience, and it’ll just sell itself. To make sure Arena is played the right way, it won’t boot unless you found a 10 x 10m space. That’s actually the only threshold, since we’ve added a single player mode to give you a taste of the gameplay. (If you don’t have friends with a Quest) In the process of creating Arena, we had to come up with a whole bunch of original solutions for problems that arise with 1-to-1 movement based gameplay. Let’s hope these set the bar for future similar experiences!”
Here’s the teaser for the experience the developers released back in 2019:
Be sure to check back with us as we’ll bring you the details on Space Pirate Arena as soon as we have them.
Covering the immersive Out-of-Home entertainment scene for VRFocus, in his latest Virtual Arena column, industry specialist Kevin Williams reports in two parts on the new phase of investment with the growth in “Arena-Scale VR – Standalone”, This first part looking at the influence the new Oculus Quest has had on the deployment of this latest phase of location-based entertainment (LBE) VR, seeing phenomenal growth in interest.
“Arena-Scale VR” – the ability for groups of players to compete in the same virtual world has proven to be a big trend in the latest phase of commercial VR entertainment. Offering a unique element for this VR application, totally unachievable from a consumer perspective. Currently, the popular trend was for backpack PC’s to be employed to supply the virtual experience – but with the advancements in technology a new category has emerged with “Arena-Scale VR – Standalone”.
Employing standalone headsets with positional tracking, and enough processing power to create compelling content, one benefit is the ability to wirelessly communicate with each other, and in some cases additional peripherals and operator management screens; removing the cost and complexity of the backpack PC solutions.
One of the first examples of a LBE Standalone Arena-Scale experiences. Image credit: KWP
Oculus Attempts to Enter the Arena
The first series of standalone headsets started to make an appearance in 2018, and one of those which received a special amount of attention was the Oculus Quest. However, the interest in using this kind of hardware in location-based entertainment (LBE) has not been a priority for the manufacturer, until recently.
Oculus underlined a new commitment to LBE VR when, at 2018s Oculus Connect 5 (OC5) convention, the company invited the operator and developer, The VOID, to present an example of its “Hyper-reality” VR attraction (operating in some eleven sites). Running ‘Star Wars: Secret of the Empire’, the demonstration took OC5 delegates through a special enclosure that maps real objects with the virtual world, created in partnership with Lucasfilm’s ILMxLAB development studio.
The current chain of VOID locations is using a modified version of the, now discontinued, Oculus CV1 headset in its construction – developed under license. This is just one of a handful of such partnerships. However, in comparison to other VR headset developers, Oculus has been less active in establishing enterprise entertainment partnerships – previously seen as standoffish with regards to the explosion of interest in this application of the virtual hardware.
The same OC5 in San Jose revealed the Oculus Quest (evolving from the Santa Cruz prototype), as a new standalone platform. Separate of the PC offering, seeing the CV1 superseded by the Rift-S, the Quest offered a new cost-effective opportunity with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg promising it would run “Rift-quality experiences”. But it was the opportunity that it represented outside of the consumer market that interested a new group of developers.
During OC5, Oculus started to reposition its sights on a possible pivot to fully support the LBE VR scene. Running alongside The VOID popup installation at the Oculus event, was a demonstration of their Capability Concept Demonstrator (CCD), based on a previous popular CV1 game. ‘Dead and Buried Arena’ was a demonstration created by Oculus with support from the original videogame developers. The demonstration included a 371 square-metre arena, with two teams of three players each, wearing Oculus Quest. The demonstrations illustrated the prototype’s asymmetric “co-location” technology.
At the time of the demonstration, Oculus stated that it expected location-based entertainment (LBE) developers to benefit from the technology developed for the D&BA system. But, after the expenditure of such a complicated demonstration, all news of further investment in this direction ceased, and even the original D&BA team was disbanded internally. On the conference stage, the pivot was on par with the statement from Oculus’ head of experiences, telling the audience that the company now loved the idea of an audience being able to go to a destination and have an experience and to love that experience and continue that adventure at home.
The 2018 artist’s interpretation of how Oculus envisaged an LBE arena. Image credit: Oculus
Oculus Quest would go on to be launched in May of 2019, and by October of that year it was reported that sales had achieved some 500,000 units, but it soon became a very popular seller up to the Christmas period (deliveries in some areas pushed to late-February). The platform is proving to be one of the most successful for VR sales from the Facebook-owned company, since its partnership with Samsung with the Gear VR. But regarding an LBE initiative, none was forthcoming until the end of 2019.
It would not be until the Facebook Developer’s Conference (F8) 2019 that we would see a reversion in the approach to commercial entertainment, with a pivot in the approach for the ‘Oculus for Business Initiative’. This came with the introduction of a new program for the Oculus headset range, including the Quest – led internally by Facebook directly. Oculus for Business had been created as a division in 2017, focused on enterprise customers rather than entertainment.
Others’ Lead the Charge in Standalone
Though receiving very little coverage, major LBE VR deployment of the OculusQuest was undertaken in partnership with leading Japanese video game and amusement operation, BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment. This came with the launch of their brand new MAZARIA facility in Sunshine City, Ikebukuro, Tokyo, during July 2019, when the latest investment by the corporation in a hybrid VR-amusement crossover was revealed.
This came in the form of ‘PAC-MAN Challenge VR’, a two-player experience which sees players using the Oculus Quest standalone headset to allow players to race around the iconic PAC-MAN play-space, collecting power pills and avoiding ghosts, all in 256 seconds. The title was started by the BANDAI NAMCO “Project-i-Can” team two-years ago, working in cooperation with Oculus, at that time developing the prototype Santa Cruz version that would evolve into Oculus Quest.
Two-players take on the ghosts in PAC-MAN Challenge VR. Image credit: MoguraVR
The second big development surrounding Oculus Quest’s usage in location-based entertainment (LBE), saw ILMxLAB announce a popup training arena based on the ‘Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series’ – in partnership with LBE developer Nomadic. The company announced it was opening at six Cinemark theatres, running ‘Lightsaber Dojo, A Star Wars Experience’ (closing in February). The ILMxLAB videogame is an arcade-style version of the consumer original, using Oculus Quest standalone headsets, players paid some $9.99 for a six-minute experience.
This the first of the main announcements of Oculus supporting the use of their standalone hardware with major IP franchises (ILMxLAB, LucasFilms’ immersive entertainment studio, has connections with the company already, having previously worked together with The VOID projects). Nomadic previously opened its free-roam venue concept under a partnership with Oculus.
Much rumoured, Oculus eventually lifted the veil on its full pivot to support the LBE VR scene. Building on the initial Oculus for Business division’s work, and under the new direction, it was revealed during F8 that new Oculus for Business bundles would be available, supported by the needed Terms of Service (ToS) and warranties for deployment in commercial entertainment and other enterprise applications. This would be supported by a software development kit (SDK) that would allow access to a suite of tools, and most importantly the ‘Co-Location’ platform used for multi-player connectivity – unable to be achieved on the consumer Oculus Quest.
At the beginning of this year, the promise of Oculus support for a standalone VR solution for enterprise was indefinitely put on hold. After the disbanding of the 2018 Capability Concept Demonstrator (CCD) team, Oculus had been attempting to create a workable ‘co-location’ solution on top of the standard SDK that addressed concerns from legal, over tracking accuracy that could lead to injury. Taking much longer than hoped and leading to still being stated as “Available Soon”, months after being promised.
Attempting to stem the floodgates, Oculus for Business went ahead and released an Enterprise User Agreement addendum for the Quest, permitting “Hospitality Entertainment” deployment. But sadly, much of what the LBE sector was waiting for was still prohibited, the addendum seemed more drafted for single-site VR arcades to use the Enterprise licensed Quest but forbidding use of Oculus co-location functionality.
New stipulations saw enterprise developers forced to create their own co-location firmware, and undertake appropriate liability coverage, all to placate the concern overshadowing corporate thinking. However, this “speedbump” has not deterred the entertainment sector from embracing the opportunity, even if they may be looking at alternative VR platforms to release on.
Independent Devs stake their claim
The corporation had initiated the Oculus ISV (Independent Software Vendors) Program to accelerate customer adoption of VR solutions built for Oculus enterprise products. The first of the developers selected by Oculus to support this program was the French location-based entertainment developer, Scale-1 Portal. Earlier in 2019, the company launched its ‘VOXEL ARENA’ platform, which saw networked Oculus Quest systems for four-player competition employed in the LBE VR market. The new system will be launched in March of 2020, with its first title being ‘PANIK’, offering a fun and challenging teamwork-based virtual experience.
Players competing in ‘PANIK’ at one of the first tests of the platform in September. Image credit: Scale-1 Portal
Another member of the Oculus ISV program is Chicken Waffle, an independent developer with a wide track record in content development and with videogames on many of the leading platforms. The company has also partnered with CenterTec, one of the established leaders of the deployment of the concept of VR arcades, with a successful location business that has also expanded into the educational side of the market, to become a community technology centre.
Working with Chicken Waffle, CenterTec has developed its own Oculus Quest powered mobile multi-user solution and has defined several titles that will offer a cost-effective platform. For operators looking at the investment needed to operate a sensible free-roaming offering, this platform will be backed up with the experience gained from operating educational content and will use many of the unique patents held by the operation. But unlike other developers, this system is cross-platform reliant and was seen supporting several of the standalone VR headsets at CES 2020.
Concerning the availability of a software and hardware solution for the VR arcade operators was one aspect under scrutiny with a question over the Oculus Quest availability for LBE deployment. One of the leading providers of commercially licensed VR game content, and venue management solutions, is Springboard VR – an operation with some 500 companies globally deploying their solution, utilising content from all the major consumer game studios, offering suitable VR content licensing through the platform. Most recently, Beat Games (Beat Saber) and VR Nerds (Tower Tag) added their successfully licensed content to this extensive library.
Springboard VR announced during last July its LBE + Education Solution for the platform, offering a device management kit for the Oculus Quest, allowing access for LBE, training and educational content, and for operators to run the system in location-based entertainment venues. This includes the content that had been appropriately licensed with a subscription model for commercial usage. The company is supplying a beta landing page – which at this point has not been updated. Springboard VR is working to support the Oculus Quest and currently supports VR hardware from Pico, HP, and HTC.
The marketing campaign for the beta program for interested supporters. Image credit: Springboard VR
Fennec Labs, an augmented and virtual reality development studio with specialisation in VR arcade content, had a big hand in developing the Springboard VR management platform. The company has been privately working on its own standalone VR platform, having undertaken a detailed evaluation of the current crop of headset options, evaluating Oculus Quest and Pico Neo 2 platforms for their PvP title called ‘RE: COIL’ – offering a new multi-player arena-scale LBE VR experience (the project is not tied to the Oculus API). With the launch in early-2020, the company proposes a basic licensing model for operators to get their hands on this title initially but are intending a complete turnkey model in the future.
SynthesisVR – the developer of one of the most advanced software solutions and management programs for operators of VR arcades and LBE VR venues, has established its own considerable library of the latest commercially licensed VR game content. SynthesisVR revealed its entry into LBE standalone support, having developed a version of its premium platform to support the Oculus Quest, HTC Vive Focus Plus, and Pico, as well as other upcoming Android-based headsets. This agnostic approach will offer VR arcade operators the ability to manage multiple devices, launching content simultaneously across them, and with tools for time management and payment collection (all licensed for commercial deployment).
Studio I-Illusions recently teased us with footage of Space Pirate Arena, in what has been described as a multiplayer “hall-scale” VR game, based on the Oculus Quest, for deployment in commercial locations. It is at an early (beta) stage of development but has seen serious interest from VR arcade operators based on its IP – this is a serious addition to the ranks of content looking at this opportunity.
Sequence from the teaser video of the beta version of ‘Space Pirate Arena’
UK-based developer Make Real, with a background in immersive networked technology solutions for enterprise and Out-of-Home Entertainment, is another entrant working towards releasing its own Oculus Quest LBE experience. The company is working on a four-player networked VR videogame within a shared “co-location” space, whilst a “theatre-scale” AR audience, powered by 5G, mixes the realities scale. Building on a collaborative puzzle solving narrative, the title has been developed in support of the Oculus for Business LBE initiative and is expected to go live in mid-2020, for operators to franchise.
The concluding part of this feature on the Standalone LBE scene follows shortly.
In 2018 at the Oculus Connect 5 developers conference Facebook’s VR teams showed an incredible tech demo of the still-unreleased Oculus Quest.
They demonstrated arena-scale virtual reality powered by the standalone Oculus Quest and its Touch tracked hand controllers. The demo of shared “co-location” of six Oculus Quests featured two teams of three playing shooting game Dead and Buried together — plus a tablet was able to peer into the same shared space. Check it out in the video below.
The tech demo even used Quest’s built-in Oculus Insight tracking and inverse kinematics to map head and controllers to avatar movement. The space was covered in lines which seemed to help the pre-release Oculus Insight tracking system find features in the environment to anchor positional tracking.
Arena-Scale When?
Some software developers, either inspired by the potential of early Oculus Quest hardware kits or this demo, have been working on projects that put multiple Quests in the same large-scale space. But between F8 and OC6, multiple developer conferences have come and gone since the demo with no updates from Facebook about a software development kit (SDK) to easily enable developers to build these kind of experiences.
Though some developers are trying to find alternative routes to enable and deploy these types of experiences without needing official support from Facebook, it is a risky path to take. Developers may need the Quest’s built-in Guardian system to support much larger spaces to make it fully safe — it is currently limited to around 7.6 meters by 7.6 meters.
That isn’t forthcoming just yet.
“The experience at OC5 was a tech demo exploring the possibilities of standalone headsets. Since the launch of Quest, we have focused on delivering a great consumer VR experience and have nothing new to share around co-location features at this time,” a statement from Facebook reads in response to questions from UploadVR.
Last year an incredible teaser released for a kind of sequel to Space Pirate Trainer — the defining VR wave shooter available on practically all platforms. This new title from I-Illusions, however, is far from a wave shooter. It is a multiplayer Oculus Quest game that is a bit like tag. Think laser tag but simulated walls reflect the lasers for unexpected surprises.
“Space Pirate Arena is definitely in a playable state and it will hopefully be released as an alpha for VR enthusiasts soon. We’ve held back on releasing new details as we had hoped to simplify the setup for mainstream audiences, though this might be a little while off yet,” reads a statement from I-Illusions.
Balthazar Auxietre is creative director and co-founder at InnerspaceVR, the studio behind a series of impactful VR experiences including A Fisherman’s Tale, Firebird and the charming Doctor Who story The Runaway voiced by The Doctor herself Jodie Whittaker. Innerspace also made a VR “poetic virtual garden” project called Peach Garden that worked “nicely”, according to Auxietre, in a setting of 30 meters by 15 meters with eight people simultaneously using Oculus Quest development hardware.
“While we found out the Quest is ‘technically’ capable of supporting these kinds of experiences,” Auxietre wrote in an open letter this week. “To this day there is no proper software access for developers to the guardian settings and sadly this locks us from distributing this type of content to any audience.”
Guardians And 3D Maps
On consumer versions of the Quest, Facebook doesn’t allow any third-party software or developers access to the headset’s on-board cameras. The Guardian system on Quest does let players view their surroundings through these cameras and set safe boundaries with this view. As you play in a simulated world and near the edge of the safe space, a blue grid wall shows up to warn you how close you are to the edges of the boundaries you set.
“With the developer kits we were given by Oculus a few months after the show, we discovered that we had access to the guardian settings and that even without first-party support, ‘co-location’ (multiplayer VR within a shared physical space) was not super hard to pull off,” Auxietre wrote in his letter. “We also realized that the tracking was really robust in a large scale environment.”
While The VOID, Dreamscape Immersive and many other location-based startups offer large-scale VR attractions, the vast majority operate using so-called outside-in tracking systems and even require visitors to wear backpacks or markers worn on the wrists or feet. All this extra equipment is costly in terms of both actual hardware and the time it takes to initially set up and fit to visitors. These systems are also prone to occasional bugs and occlusion. If you strap a tracker to your foot, for example, to show the position of legs in VR, the system can break if the tracker falls off. The system can break too if a player blocks the line of sight between another player and the cameras placed outside the tracked space.
With Oculus Quest, each headset knows its own location and the boundaries of the space with the information to calculate these positions never leaving the device, according to Facebook’s Oculus. Facebook refers to the point cloud it generates to identify position as a “3D map” and in a report we published in September last year, Facebook representatives said that they store these locally on the headset.
“We don’t collect and store images or 3D maps of your environment on our servers today — images are not stored anywhere, and 3D maps are stored locally on the headset [for Quest],” a Facebook representative wrote in an email at the time of our report. “That said, we’ll notify consumers if this information is required for VR experiences we provide on Quest/Rift S in the future.”
A “family friendly” multiplayer Oculus Quest project called “Oddball” was recently shown at Two Bit Circus in Los Angeles. The creators declined to answer how they sync up locations between players.
While we don’t know what methods developers are using currently, it may be possible to have Quest controllers for each headset “tap” against the same calibration point to tell each headset where it is in the same shared space.
There are probably more arena-scale multiplayer Quest projects in the world and if you’re working on any we’d love to hear from you through tips@uploadvr.com.
When it comes to Peach Garden and InnerspaceVR, the developer writes: “For a year and a half now, we’ve hoped for a clear announcement from Oculus to happen in the wake of the Dead and Buried demo. While we have learned from our own experiments with the device that the hardware is mature enough to push these boundaries, it’s unclear to us why Oculus would make the decision to show this demo — which inspired us and several others — and then stop advocating for this use case entirely.”
Auxietre says he tried to contact Facebook both through its Oculus for Business program and contacts at the company and hasn’t been able to get a clear answer “as to how and when the official support for co-location and large play spaces might happen. We simply have no clue if Oculus even plans to give access to their co-location SDK either through their business program or on a case-by-case basis to selected developers.”
“We did not randomly choose the Quest as a platform for our project, we made this decision because of our confidence in Oculus’ ability to push the boundaries and open new paths for developers,” Auxietre wrote. “Today, we’re in need of clear answers.”
A Facebook representative wrote in an email to UploadVR that developers reaching out to their teams about this functionality “have been directed to the enterprise and hospitality license, which provides more detail on terms.” The Oculus for Business Enterprise Use Agreement includes the restriction that “Unless separately approved in writing by Oculus, you will not…modify the tracking functionality (including the implementation of any custom co-location functionality) on your Software or take any action that will disable, modify, or interfere with the Oculus Guardian System.” The document, last updated on January 21, 2020, also refers to a separate “Hospitality Entertainment Combination Addendum” that includes further guidelines for arcades or location-based VR experiences, requiring that customers receive “proper use” training before using the VR hardware.
We’ll provide updates on co-location as they happen. The Game Developers Conference takes place the week of March 16 and Facebook’s next developer conference F8 takes place on May 5 and 6, right before the one year anniversary of Oculus Quest going on sale.
There are certain virtual reality (VR) titles now that could be called classics. Videogames all fans of the technology should have tried at least once, such as Job Simulator, Battlezone, EVE: Valkyrie and Space Pirate Trainerto name just a few. The developer of the latter experience I-Illusions has today announced a sequel, set in the same universe but going multiplayer – Space Pirate Arena.
Space Pirate Trainer was a purely single-player experience set in a 360-degree environment but with an interactive area of just 180-degrees. With no movement, it was great to showcase VR to new players. Space Pirate Arena aims to turn that gameplay on its head, providing a genre-defining experience for standalone headsets.
At present, Space Pirate Arena is a PvP shooter designed to work in court-sized environments – think basketball, tennis, any sort of sports hall – in what can be described as a frenzied game of hide and seek. With an open area to run around in, Space Pirate Arena creates a virtual environment with walls, doors and such like. It’s all designed around movement and getting players active in VR (a theme becoming far more commonplace).
“Space Pirate Trainer gave a glimpse of what happens when you add physicality in gameplay,” said I-Illusions’ founder Dirk Van Welden in a statement. “We wanted to push it further because we believe in the added immersiveness of one to one movement in virtual reality. There’s zero motion sickness, and feels incredibly real.”
I-Illusions has released a teaser trailer showcasing an early version of the videogame in action and it certainly looks promising. Recorded using Oculus Quests and GoPro camera’s the studio hasn’t finalised which VR systems Space Pirate Arena will support, although Oculus Quest seems to be a given. Untethered devices like HTC Vive Focus are the most likely avenue to go down for complete freedom in the large areas required.
Supposedly there isn’t a limit to the number of players which could participate, so scaling up is definitely going to happen. When is also a mystery, with I-Illusions yet to settle on a release window. When further details are made available, VRFocus will let you know.
The developers of one of VR’s earliest and most popular wave shooters — Space Pirate Trainer — are showing footage from a multiplayer Oculus Quest game requiring court-sized play areas.
Space Pirate Arena needs a large open space for a VR play area and players connected on the same Wi-Fi network to work, says I-Illusions founder Dirk Van Welden. Just how large? Around 10 meters by 10 meters, or more than 30 feet in either direction. That means you’d need a large open region, like a tennis court, with the proper lighting conditions to make this possible with Oculus Quest as depicted in a teaser video shared today by I-Illusions.
There’s no release date or pricing structure set for the experience yet and they believe they can scale up to support larger sessions. The gun in the game can charge up and a charged up shot can bounce off the walls. The developers say it plays like a game of hide and seek rather than a player-vs-player deathmatch.
I-Illusions isn’t sharing much more about the title just yet but Van Welden did say they are “using tech that is out for everyone” to share spatial anchors between systems. “It is all bound to change,” Van Welden said, while also specifying that it can work without an active connection to the full Internet. That means the game should be playable camped out in the middle of nowhere with untethered VR headsets like Oculus Quest all connected to the same laptop’s shared Wi-Fi network.
We’ll share updates on Space Pirate Arena as soon as we have them.
The same OC5 in San Jose 
Much rumoured, Oculus eventually lifted the veil on its full pivot to support the LBE VR scene. Building on the initial 
