Although I did not attend, this year at San Diego’s Comic-Con is an attraction like no others. In conjunction with the Amazon Series, ‘Jack Ryan’, is a 60,000 square foot immersive VR Themeworld experience. This thing is huge. A crew from Media Monks, an immersive marketing firm from Holland, worked for months to create this outrageous, location-based experience. You Go Guys!
As mentioned before, the experience takes place over a 60,000 square foot lot at the San Diego Comic-con. Participants done a backpack computer complete with Oculus VR headset, a climbing harness and motion control markers for hand and feet. During the experience, participants engage in gun fights, duck and cover to avoid fire, Get dropped in from a helicopter (Something I never thought of), escape from a zip line, walk a plank and drive a motion controlled vehicle. These guys pulled out all the stops! This is fantastic and I’m glad someone was able to pull it off if anything as a proof of concept.
I don’t know much about Media Monks. However, their headquarters are in Amsterdam and they have offices around the world. The realm of immersive marketing is so big I have trouble wrapping my head around the scale and it is only getting bigger. If there any ambitious young people not certain to place all their eggs in the film or games basket may want to consider going into this growing field.
Business-wise I see this as a marketing event sponsored by Amazon. Such practices are often employed by other production companies such as Lion’s Gate. So this experience is tied in with a major IP, taking place at the world’s largest geek’s fair. I’m sure this experience will do a great job demonstrating what could be done with VR immersive experience and hopefully open the floodgates for other future location-based attractions.
As a foundation upon which to create a business model from I have my doubts. This is a very linear experience. Very few people, except for the die-hard Jack Ryan lovers, will want to go through this experience more than once. This is also a solo experience. The future of immersive experiences is dependent on collaborative experiences. Until the opportunity is given for participants to share the experience with others it will be a hard sell. Folks may argue that there is an interactor helping the participant through the experience. However, this interactor has no digital presence and is only concerned for getting the participant through the experience in the safest, fastest way while still adhering to the context of the themeworld. If the interactor had a digital presence and collaborated with the participant in fleshing out a unique story then folks would really fall in love with the adventure. Then of course there is the evil specter of throughput preventing this from being a commercially viable experience. I don’t know how many participants can be in the experience at one time but it does not look like many. The involvement of an interactor for each participant also drives up the cost of the experience itself. If an attraction such as this were in a for-profit facility then the throughput would have to be increased at least by tenfold or the cost of there experience would need to be staggering. This looks like a fantastic experience. However, would it warrant a $100 admission price?
Overall, this is a very exciting and promising prototype. I wish I could be in San Diego to give this experience a try! Hopefully events such as this will continue to keep attracting the attention of the world and make immersive themeworld experience an expected component of our every day media.
