The concept of the virtual reality (VR) arcade has been growing in popularity lately. As covered in the 3-part series The Virtual Arena, out-of-home VR experiences have begun popping up in many places. It seems that Scottsdale, Airzona will soon be getting one, too.
Scottsdale’s Octane Raceway is best known as a place for racing in high-powered Go Karts, but soon the Raceway will be opening a new facility to add to the go-karting, bowling and videogame arcade already on site; a free-roam multiplayer VR arena.
The new VR attraction is titled Velocity VR and was created by Australian VR company Zero Latency. The new VR arena will occupy 3,500 square feet, with no physical obstacles or walls within the play area, creating a massive open arena for VR players to explore. The available experiences are set to be around 15 minutes long and available to players ages 13 and over.
Velocity VR will be opening on 29th May for Memorial Day, and the first experience available for guests will be ‘Survival’, in which up to six players can participate in a zombie apocalypse scenario which will require coordination and team work in order to fight off hordes of the undead. Additional experiences will be added later in the year.
“Octane Raceway is committed to the most exciting and immersive experiences for our customers that leave them awestruck and wanting more. Velocity VR falls in line with that commitment, and will truly be a unique and memorable attraction,” says Scott Sanders, CEO of Octane Raceway.
The experience will cost $40 (USD) during weekdays and $45 at weekends. Anyone who is interested can go to the official Velocity VR website for more information, and to sign up to be notified for when reservations become available.
VRFocus will continue to bring you news of upcoming VR experiences.
Over the past three years, Melbourne, Australia-based startup Zero Latency has been refining its multiplayer virtual reality arcade platform, which currently has three playable games for up to six players with plans to add eight-player support by the end of this year.
The idea came to co-founders Tim Ruse (who’s now the CEO) and Scott Vandonkelaar (CTO) when the two first saw the Oculus Rift while working together at web agency Roadhouse Digital.
“The Rift had just come out and there was also this craze with IRLShooter’s Patient Zero, which combined laser tag with real actors and a zombie storyline, and the idea was to put these two things together and create a new form of entertainment from scratch,” Ruse explained.
The pair left their secure jobs and turned to crowdfunding to kickstart the idea, raising $30,000 on Pozible in July 2014. Ruze said that while this was hard money to raise, crowdfunding allowed the startup to get the message out to VR enthusiasts who were eager to step into virtual worlds and fight cooperatively. This also opened the door for traditional VR investment.
By August 2014 the company had a 2,200 square foot system operating with two players in a completely tetherless freeform multiplayer environment complete with pistols. A year later, the team had upgraded the platform to six players combating virtual reality zombies with assault rifles in the Unity-developed Outbreak game.
Fast forward to today and the company’s development team has created three new games: Survival, a defend-the-fortress style zombie horde experience featuring a squad of heavily armored soldiers, Singularity, which pits a team of space marines against rogue robots on a massive spaceship, and Engineerium, a puzzle-based exploration of a gravity-defying ancient alien world.
Zero Latency has a team of 10 people plus some external contractors working on new titles as well as downloadable content for existing experiences. Vandonkelaar said it takes between seven and nine months to create a game. A new title will be introduced for the platform this August, which will expand the zombie concept to a longer, more exploratory experience.
“We’re a one-stop shop right now,” Vandonkelaar said. “While we’re not game designers ourselves, we’ve tapped into the local game development community. And we’ve spent a lot of time developing and exploring free roam VR. Our goal is to create 15 or 30-minute experiences that people of all skill levels can enjoy and get people through the system in a timely manner.”
By this June, Zero Latency will have 10 sites across the globe and 24 by end of 2017, including U.S. locations in Orlando, Boston, Philadelphia, Wisconsin and the Poconos. The company owns several facilities, including its Melbourne location, and licenses out its platform through partnerships with companies like Main Event Entertainment, which hosts the VR arcade inside its Pointe Orlando arcade and entertainment center.
Hands-on With Zero Latency
I was able to go hands-on with the three current Zero Latency games in Orlando, which operates under the name VPlay Reality. The experience begins with meeting a Game Master, who will first walk you through all of the equipment and then serve as your guide inside of the 4,000 square foot arena. It takes about 8 minutes for the Game Master to walk you through the vest and backpack (which houses an Alienware PC gaming laptop), OSVR HDK2 headset and Razer headphone/microphone before running through the two-handed assault rifle (another 7 minutes).
While nowhere near as heavy as a real gun, the assault rifle is a sturdy handful with a button on the bottom for reloading and a button on the side to change the in-game configuration to any of four guns. Two of those guns are automatic, while the other two require individual cocking with every shot. It’s these latter in-game guns (which vary from game to game), that will leave your arm sore the next day because it’s quite a workout when zombies are swarming you or robots and drones are surrounding you in-game. You get more points for killing with the shotgun-style weapons in games than you do for the automatics.
Vandonkelaar said these custom-made guns use a mixture of optical and sensor-based tracking, which allows them to operate independently within any game inside the arena. Patent-pending technology using more than 100 cameras and motion capture devices track each player in real-time as they move.
“You can pass them between players; you can wield two guns in the game,” Vandonkelaar added. “We’ve also used dual pistols before as part of our crowdfunding campaign. But we’re focused on the rifles due to the safety aspect. If you give people pistols they’re more likely to wave guns around and hit another player.”
Part of the pre-brief explains the radar system that pops up in-game when any two (or more) players are close together. It offers a top-down video of the player and shows where the other players are, so it’s easy to move away from them and not bump into anyone in the heat of battle.
Once your team of six is all geared up, it’s time to enter the huge arena – which is essentially a pitch black room that the Game Master guides you into with a flashlight and then spaces you out. It’s inside where you place the rifle on the floor in front of you and pull down the VR headset and headphones. The Game Master turns on the game, which allows you to see and then pick up your rifle. And then you select a circle with your screen name above it for the actual game to load.
After playing a lot of Oculus Touch and HTC Vive games, it is a bit jarring to not see your hands inside of VR. This platform focuses on the gun and allows you to walk and run around, but you don’t have any form of gloves to bring your hands into the experience (at least not yet). And for anyone who plays a lot of home games on those platforms, Unity can only go so far inside of VR, so the graphics of these first-generation games are certainly solid, but they’re not raising the bar.
Vandonkelaar did say their platform will support Unreal Engine 4 and other technology beyond Unity. And Zero Latency is working on an Software Development Kit to allow developers to create original games for this platform.
What really separates this multiplayer Zero Arcade experience from anything at home and from some of the other VR arcades that are popping up around the world is the role of the Game Master. Ruse said the company focuses its hiring for this position by looking at only passionate, heavily tech-skilled people who are friendly and great with customer service.
“Early on we found they’re integral to the experience because people have a one-to-one connection with them and the Game Master brings the group into the experience,” Ruse said. “We want to give them more control, where they can actually control your destiny like in the old Dungeons and Dragons games. They bond with them and they’ll know how skilled a group is and will be able to choose different options to cater the gameplay experience to that particular group.”
Zero Latency is already testing this concept in Melbourne with its frequent players, so it’s only a matter of time before it rolls out to the rest of the world. I saw first-hand where this customization could make the gameplay better. While there were five other players ready to take on zombies with me in Orlando for 15 minutes, only one other player was interested in taking on robots in the longer 30-minute Singularity game.
Before we jumped in, our Game Master warned us that things would get pretty crazy in the game, which was designed for six players. If she could have tweaked things, the gameplay would have been more fun. While I didn’t die once in the zombie game thanks to teamwork and a full squad, I died 19 times and my teammate Enrique died 15 times when we were left to fend for ourselves in a game designed for six players.
All three of these VR games are different, which opens the door for replay. I personally enjoyed killing zombies the most because you just can’t go wrong there. Zombies are just part of the timed onslaught that will come at you in the burned-out city environment at night. You’re given some time between rounds to bolster up your defenses before the monsters tear them down from every angle (including above) to kill you. The action is fast and frenetic and all confined within a fixed area within your fortification. There are a pair of elevators for snipers to take a higher position to eliminate enemies, but I stayed close to the ground throughout the experience (although everyone goes airborne at the end when a military chopper picks up your platform to escape the zombies).
Singularity is the longest (30 minutes instead of 15) and most expensive ($40 instead of $20) of the three games. It’s also likely a game that’s a lot more fun with the full six players engaging the robots, flying drones and AI gone mad. The interesting part of this sci-fi shooter is how easy it is to maneuver throughout a VR world, while also walking in real-life. Through the use of elevators, tight corridors and moving platforms, your mind does believe you’ve traversed a massive spaceship by the end of the boss battle. There’s also a mind-bending zero gravity walk-on-walls sequence as well as a vertigo-inducing battle across a narrow ledge. The game splits the teams in two during the middle portion and then reunites them for the final showdown.
A Puzzler That Isn’t For People Afraid of Heights
Speaking of vertigo, Engineerium, the newest of the games, isn’t for anyone who has problems with heights. Set high above an alien world, the paths and platforms you explore twist and turn in all directions. There are times where you’re upside-down, which takes some getting used to considering you’re walking right-side-up in the real world. It’s truly an otherworldly and mind-tripping experience.
What’s most impressive about this platform is how seamless it is to shoot or explore or do whatever your in-game experience requires. Your mind can completely focus on having fun inside these game worlds without worrying about running into other players. Once Zero Latency ups the ante in the visuals departments with these first-generation games (and maybe adds some type of haptics to the vests – something the company is exploring), I can see this evolving into the type of experience you only once read about in sci-fi novels.
The team is expanding the number of players for future games to eight. Ruse said 16 players can interact inside the arena in Melbourne today, but they’re capping the number of players because of safety concerns and to ensure the games have enough room to maneuver so that it’s fun for everyone.
Melbourne-based firm Zero Latency has raised $7 million in venture funding. The company specialises in out-of-home ‘warehouse scale’ local multiplayer VR experiences, and is beginning to open attractions around the world.
Consumer VR headsets are optimised for use in a small living space, and the vast majority of software is designed with these limitations in mind. But VR can benefit from much larger spaces, particularly when the experience involves multiple local participants and promotes energetic movement across a large space.
A natural fit for a larger space is a VR-enabled combat arena, much like a cutting-edge game of laser tag. Melbourne-based Zero Latency was one of the early enablers of ‘warehouse scale’ VR, utilising custom tracking systems for the headsets and gun accessory, combined with ‘backpack’ PCs to achieve a wireless solution that allows for large scale VR gameplay that goes beyond the sort of roomscale VR experiences available in the home.
Originally known as the Inversion Project back in 2013, Zero Latency has developed rapidly, thanks to a $1m investment from Sydney-based Carthona Capital in 2014, along with crowdfunding to bolster the initial 2-player co-op ‘zombie shooter’ public events. It has been fully operational as a public attraction in Melbourne for over a year, and now offers three modes (zombie survival, puzzle solving, and space shooter) and supports up to six players. The technology was recently brought to Tokyo, Madrid and Orlando, and uses Alienware backpack PCs designed in collaboration with Zero Latency.
A fully-untethered, custom VR experience, played with friends within a large arena is undoubtedly the future of the laser-tag style attraction, as the possibilities of a virtual environment are limitless. Companies like Zero Latency are expected to grow, and according to The Australian, a further $7 million in venture funding was backed by Thorney Investment Group, Contango Asset Management and Regal Funds Management, with original investors Carthona contributing $2.7 million of the latest round.
Last week Zero Latency announced a partnership with Main Event Entertainment to open a warehouse sized virtual reality (VR) experience in Orlando, Florida. Today the VR specialist has revealed another partnership, this time with Family Entertainment Group (FEG) to open two more VR centres offering free-roam experiences.
A Zero Latency arena will open at Kalahari Resorts, Pocono Mountains, Pennsylvania in December 2016 as part of a property-wide expansion, followed by the opening of another arena at Kalahari Resorts, Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin in January 2017.
“Zero Latency offers the largest free-roam VR experiences on the planet,” said Bob Cooney, Zero Latency’s head of global business development and an amusement industry veteran. “It makes complete sense to work with FEG to open our warehouse-scale virtual reality gaming attractions in Kalahari Resorts and bring our immersive, exciting games to fun-loving attendees at some of the largest indoor waterparks in the world. FEG’s vision and commitment to delivering exclusive guest experiences makes them the ideal partners for Zero Latency.”
These new facilities will join existing arenas in Melbourne, Madrid, and Tokyo. They range from 2,000 to over 4,000 square feet, placing six players in the same videogame simultaneously. Zero Latency created its own patent-pending motion tracking scales to fit any size arena and has been successfully tested with up to 16 concurrent players.
“Zero Latency’s virtual reality gaming systems are light-years ahead of anything on the market,” said George Smith, founder and CEO at Family Entertainment Group. “We are thrilled to be installing this unique and wonderfully entertaining gaming experience for our partners at Kalahari Resorts. It will enhance the already over-the-top levels of fun to be had at the Kalahari locations in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.”
The VR company hasn’t specified which of its experiences will be made available in the two new facilities, but they most likely to be the same as the arena in Orlando. This has three different game options: Zombie Survival, Singularity and Engineerium. In Zombie Survival players fight off hordes of attacking zombies, while Singularity is a space-themed game aimed at kids, and Engineerium, is a family orientated puzzle game.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of Zero Latency, reporting back with any further announcements.
As often stated, you have to experience VR to truly believe. Arcade settings are perfect places to introduce someone to the immersive virtual experience while having a bit of fun with friends and companies are certainly taking note. HTC valued the VR arcade market at $100 million, revealing more than 120 titles signed up at the start of this month and we reported on them opening Viveland in Taiwan only a day before that. The VR arcade scene in China is booming these days.
We’ve even seen some of this scale popping up in the U.S., such as The Void, which recently debuted a Ghostbusters experience. But now, we’ve got a new development as Zero Latency expands from Melbourne, Australia to Orlando, Florida and brings the US their very first warehouse-scale free roam virtual reality facility.
Zero Latency equips you with a gun, headset, and backpack in a warehouse where you and other players’ movements are tracked by cameras all over the area. That tracking is utilized to reflect your moves and actions in various scenarios, including being overrun by zombies.
The Orlando facility, announced in a press release that the facility won’t be as large as the one in Australia (2k square feet vs roughly 4k), but the program will scale with no issues. Beyond that, they’re bringing over the same gear including Razer’s OSVR HDK 2.0 VR headset, the Alienware powered backpack PC, and players will be tracked by Zero Latency’s proprietary technology.
Zero Latency’s facility in Australia opened to a wave of excitement in the form of six-week wait lists for the experience and will be opening in Spain to go along with the existing establishment in Japan. The warehouse-scale experience will be sharing space with a Main Event facility in Pointe Orlando near the Orange County Convention Center, and it’ll be the first Main Event in Florida.
“Warehouse-scale, free-roam, virtual reality gaming simply cannot be created at home,” stated Main Event Entertainment president and CEO Charlie Keegan in a prepared statement. “Zero Latency provides an undeniably compelling reason for gamers, families, parties, and friends to come out for a mind-blowingly fun and immersive group experience. Zero Latency is a perfect match for the state of-the-art attractions featured at Main Event Entertainment at Pointe Orlando.”
Virtual reality (VR) comes in all shapes and sizes, from seated experiences on Oculus Rift to room-scale content on HTC Vive, but some companies have gone even bigger. Utah, US-based The VOID and Australia’s Zero Latency are two experiences where visitors can immerse themselves in VR worlds in huge warehouse spaces unencumbered by cables. Today Main View Entertainment – a destination that combines dining, virtual and interactive game play and bowling – has announced a free-roam, multi-player VR experience called V-Play Reality, powered by Zero Latency tech.
This month Main View Entertainment will be opening its first Orlando, Florida-based location at Pointe Orlando, and V-Play Reality will be one of the attractions on offer. V-Play Reality will take up 2,200 square foot of the 45,000 square-foot entertainment complex, enabling players to walk, run, and work their way through different virtual terrains from level to level.
“Main Event Entertainment has always been the innovator in bowling-anchored entertainment and Zero Latency’s groundbreaking technology allows us to elevate our Eat.Bowl.Play concept to an interactive and immersive experience that cannot be created at home. There has never been anything else like it in the U.S. until now, at Main Event Entertainment at Pointe Orlando,” notes Main Event Entertainment President and CEO Charlie Keegan. “Our V-Play Reality experience will immediately be considered bucket-list worthy for both hard-core and novice gamers alike, to Head for FUN and visit our newest venue for a truly unique and stimulating group experience.”
The experience will include three different game options: Zombie Survival, Singularity and Engineerium. In Zombie Survival players fight off hordes of attacking zombies, while Singularity is a space-themed game aimed at kids, and Engineerium, is a family orientated puzzle game. Players don a computerized backpack and an OSVR head-mounted display (HMD).
“Zero Latency game experiences are extremely immersive with free exploration of richly themed and hyper realistic game environments,” states Zero Latency co-founder and CEO Tim Ruse. “Zero Latency’s patent-pending motion tracking technology allows natural locomotion along with a perfectly-weighted simulated weapon, and cutting-edge VR gear. Zero Latency’s unique approach allows for game session lengths and themes to be completely changed instantly, giving operators the flexibility to offer a range of superlative gaming experiences from zombie hunting to space adventure to family-friendly puzzles, which bring players back over and over again.”
Online reservations for V-Play Reality will be available at mainevent.com starting Monday, 14th November, 2016 for sessions beginning late November, 2016.
For all the latest Zero Latency news, keep reading VRFocus.
