What is great about what these guys are doing is that there are two participants in the experience, each with a Vive Headset. This is a technological breakthrough that iMyth has just recently overcome. Of course the participants are not interacting with real props and sets and of course no interactor. However, they do seem to have a very simple formula and they are making it work. Haunted Houses are the first immersive media destinations. This new form of media will grow past the Halloween!
It would appear there is yet another additional player into the immersive experience game.
The Fear Factory in SLC seems to be combining the concept of immersive VR with traditional Haunted houses.
Fear Factory
I discovered this experience while looking through the ‘Fear Factory’ article posted on Road to VR.
The Fear Factory is this jumped up Haunted House in Salt Lake City. They partnered with a local VR retailer to add VR to the overall experience. The retailer, VR Junkies, appears to be a VR Arcade equipped with HTC Vive. If this is the case then the VR portion of the Haunted House may be very similar to the experience we are creating at iMyth.
From the website, VR Junkies does not appear to be a production company, at least not yet. If that is the case then they will be displaying pre-created material from another third party company. Hopefilly this does much to encourage the overall demand for immersive content.
There isn’t much mentioned about the new attraction. One key note is that the experience will be un-tethered. I believe the wireless experience will dominate V2 of the immersive experience. It’s only a matter of time and money until the technology catches up with demand.
All in all the Polygon folks seemed very excited. The Void guys described their plans for world domination. This is very exciting. Is Imyth a Wannabe? Sure! However. I have a hunch this is going to be big business. We may not be the first pioneers, but we can create great experiences!
I have not gone through all of the sub-links and articles but there is a lot of talk of combing games with traditional media but not a whole lot of substance.
It looks like the cat is out of the Bag. One of these Website VR channels had an opportunity to talk with Charlie Hughes at UCF.
In the the article they constant refer to the use of interactors. More specifically the article addresses the use of “smart” puppets for controlling multiple interactors at the same time. This is very similar to what we have proposed.
I recently picked up an Alienware 15 jacked up with an NVidea 980M Graphics card. I initially thought this could provide a backpack graphics use for our VR experiences. Maybe it can. However, Neither the Vive nor Occulus support the 980M. Ultimately we are on our own. The laptop maybe good for a proof of concept. However more robust long term solutions must be sought out.
Maybe a solution will fit with MSI. They recently announced a Backpack PC with enough HP to run a GTX 980. MSI COMPUTEX Announcement. Regretfully almost nothing is known about this product. Certainly a solution like this probably wont be available by Fall. Who knows. It may just go faster than we expect 🙂
Maybe another solution can come from HP. Almost at the same time as MSI, HPI is offering the HP Omen X Backpack PC and this article from The Verge – More on HP Omen X . Even less information is known about this solution and it is mostly just in the concept stage.
Last but not least here is an entry from Zortac with their Zortac Mobile VR. This solution is by a minor player and may still be looking for funding. We’ll be listening guys!
One thing for sure. Seeing all of these articles in the same day give inspiration that bigger things are coming and this is definitely the signal for a much larger trend. We may not be able to take advantage of it immediately but if we start making plans we can put together one hell of a business plan.
