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The Future Of Virtual Reality Isn't Your Living Room - It's The Mall

kevinw729
Honored Visionary
A wave of public space virtual reality (otherwise known as location-based entertainment or LBE) is breaking, allowing everyone to experience new high-end home VR systems whose requirements puts them out of the reach of most consumers. Unique, large-scale experiences like free-roam VR, which can never be duplicated at home, will soon appear in malls and other retail destinations around the country.
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Full feature - https://www.forbes.com/sites/charliefink/2017/03/07/the-future-of-virtual-reality-isnt-your-living-room-its-the-mall/#510e19793f36
https://vrawards.aixr.org/ "The Out-of-Home Immersive Entertainment Frontier: Expanding Interactive Boundaries in Leisure Facilities" https://www.amazon.co.uk/Out-Home-Immersive-Entertainment-Frontier/dp/1472426959
42 REPLIES 42

Anonymous
Not applicable
It's a bit of a short-sighted view to have experiences that can't be experienced at home. I've said for quite some time that both Oculus and HTC need to have demo stations on shopping mall floors to raise the profile of VR, particularly around Christmas.

Having demo stations in individual shops isn't going to attract enough foot traffic.

If Oculus had a couple of demo stations where people could try out Medium, The Climb and Robo Recall they would sell A LOT of Rift's.

kevinw729
Honored Visionary
Its important to state that this piece was originally run in 2017 (though missed at the time) - but has recently been re-run by Forbes - I just wanted to make that clear, but it is a great discussion piece to share.

I agree @snowdog, the "Oculus Demo Station" concept should be reborn - now that the individuals that killed this approach no longer work for the corporation it should be revisited.

The closest equivalent would be what we recently saw at NY Airport:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/charliefink/2018/06/29/periscape-vr-takes-off-at-jfk/#58955ea8391a

https://vrawards.aixr.org/ "The Out-of-Home Immersive Entertainment Frontier: Expanding Interactive Boundaries in Leisure Facilities" https://www.amazon.co.uk/Out-Home-Immersive-Entertainment-Frontier/dp/1472426959

Anonymous
Not applicable
The thing is that the demo station idea was a good one, just poorly implemented. We still have them here in the UK in a few John Lewis shops and as far as I know they still have them in Best Buy shops in the US.

The flaw in the current setup is that the foot traffic is limited to that shop only, so people going to other shops in the mall, people window shopping and people just hanging out in the malls aren't going to try these things out.

If there were enough of them i'd agree.  As i have said several times on here though - where the hell are they?  I'm begging for a VR arcade near me.

And a VR warehouse type thingy!
Big PC, all the headsets, now using Quest 3

But how does the decline of the shopping mall play into that forecast? Sears, Macy & JC Penny in the US are closing up aren't they? and the malls that rely on the big name shops are declining accordingly. We're seeing the same signs in the UK, even John Lewis profits are in steep decline.


Public space VR is great during the time that it's considered an expensive novelty but that's not how it will be in the future. Give it 5 years and I think it'll be considered essential by most hard-core gamers... 10 years and it'll be in most people's wish list, gamers or not.

kevinw729
Honored Visionary

snowdog said:

....
The flaw in the current setup is that the foot traffic is limited to that shop only, so people going to other shops in the mall, people window shopping and people just hanging out in the malls aren't going to try these things out.



Agree @snowdog - the idea of the kiosk held water. And the original idea that BestBuy and OVR agreed was workable, but then was neglected.

I know the stations you mean in the UK - if you had gone to the CES Oculus lounge this year, you would have seen a similar approach to the one they had previously run.

We have some clients that run VR kiosks - and the issues they have to deal with is:

- Difficulty of operation
- Player understanding of operation
- Cleaning
- Vandalisum
- Repeat play

The last issue is the biggest problem - people will try kiosk once and then walk off, where the VR arcade approach offers a repeat-ability environment that can generated a good ROI.


https://vrawards.aixr.org/ "The Out-of-Home Immersive Entertainment Frontier: Expanding Interactive Boundaries in Leisure Facilities" https://www.amazon.co.uk/Out-Home-Immersive-Entertainment-Frontier/dp/1472426959

VRMageddon-1
Rising Star
I contacted Oculus that I wanted to open a VR Arcade/Oculus shop where I would emo and help people with installation and answer questions after purchase.  I was told they were not interested.

Anonymous
Not applicable
THIS IS WHERE THE THREAD TITLE IS WRONG.
The future is now and we don't need to leave the Home. In the future there will be no Malls. Just a mail order from Amazon & Google & Ebay type sellers. They will provide a Virtual Mall to walk around in.

kevinw729
Honored Visionary
We just discussed this on the Oculus Facebook forum and I have to agree with one poster - in re-posting Forbes gives the wrong in perception of the story, and I may have added to that by posting it on my sites.

I agree with you @MAC_MAN86 - the title is wrong for 2018, I would proffer this alternative:

"The Future of VR Has Grown from the Livingroom!"

https://vrawards.aixr.org/ "The Out-of-Home Immersive Entertainment Frontier: Expanding Interactive Boundaries in Leisure Facilities" https://www.amazon.co.uk/Out-Home-Immersive-Entertainment-Frontier/dp/1472426959