Free Roam VR is Taking Over in 2024

Are you running a location-based entertainment business with VR? A VR arcade, a barcade, an FEC with a VR offering? I hope you've either got free roam installed now or planned for the near future, because free roam is the future!

As VR technology becomes more and more common, free roam will be the major distinguishing factor between what people can play at home for cheap — versus what they have to come to you for.

What Is Free Roam VR?

Let's get our terms aligned first. As we go through, you'll see why free roam is the answer for location-based businesses in 2024.

Standing VR, Seated VR, or Booth VR

This is VR where the player is pretty much stuck in one place. They might have room to reach or take a step, but they are essentially still. This is by far the most common home implementation, but you'll also see it in businesses. 

Some operate with commercial licenses for home market games. There's also been a surge in unattended VR machines. With a headset mounted on a gun controller, customers can pick it up and blast some zombies for five minutes between the bowling alley and the concession. Or a coin-operated seated experience can turn those closed-off on-rails seated arcade game boxes into something a little more open and visible.

Room Scale

Here's where we run into a little blurriness. At home, room scale VR is VR where the player can walk around something like a living room, but the convention in the location-based VR is settling around considering free roam something more distinct from that. A typical home's room size is quite limited, especially considering furniture and the prospect of having even one additional player.

Free Roam

It's helpful to make this distinction because with free roam, businesses can take the room scale concept and really blow it up both in terms of players and space as the constraints of a living space no longer apply. Here's a few things we can use to define free roam:

• Tetherless: true to the word "free", VR in this category comes without cables that physically limit where the headset can be.
• Space: a good free roam experience needs enough space to make it worth it, at least 240 square feet — but it can go to 1000 square feet and beyond with some systems
• Multiplayer: if you're going to set aside that much space, your ROI is definitely going to rely on multiplayer

No advance in technology or price reduction will allow for what we call free roam at home. That means there's a good future for business owners looking to support this technology — and growing movement away from smaller experiences people can increasingly get on their own.

So free roam will set you apart. Why else is 2024 the right time?

1. It's been almost a decade of free roam VR: the software is there
2. It's been almost a decade of free roam VR: the hardware is there
3. It's been almost a decade of free roam VR: it's a proven viable revenue generator

Simply put? All the pieces are finally in the right places.

The Free Roam Experiences

Many businesses have started offering VR with commercial licensing from home games. It's an easy way to get started and gauge interest in the technology for sure, but you may be finding a ceiling. You may even be seeing a decline as people ask whether they should pay you — or just play the version on their Quest at home.

Because Free Roam isn't really available on the home market, home market developers aren't producing free roam games. Luckily, this means you've got some dedicated companies to choose from.

Typical options for business owners are both cooperative and competitive shooters, and escape rooms and similar experiences. That's your first choice. Do you want one, the other, or both?

Free Roam Hardware Choices

Because Free Roam says goodbye to the cable, you can't just pick any VR headset off the shelf. There are two solid options, both with benefits and drawbacks.

Meta Quest 2 / 3

The Meta Quest 2 was a massive home success, and also saw fast adoption in the location-based VR business space. The Quest 3 is only a few months old, but has followed in its sibling's footsteps.

The best thing about the Quest is the price. You can get started at $499 USD per headset — though you will likely want to purchase extended battery packs and third party headstraps to help meet the greater power and resilience demands of a busy entertainment business.

HTC VIVE Focus 3

At $1,300 per headset, the VIVE Focus 3 is immediately and obviously a much bigger investment than the Quest. But you do get something from that. HTC designed this headset with free roam LBVR in mind. As an optional subscription, you can access features that make it much easier to operate a multiplayer VR setup while keeping your tracking optimal.

Besides that, the hardware comes with swappable batteries. Keep an eye on the battery life and keep your spaces charging, and your staff can get a headset back in the fray at full power in minutes for uninterrupted back-to-back play all day.

Finally, if you want to invest in the best possible quality of experience, the Business Streaming Mode allows you to stream a game wirelessly from a gaming PC. This means that, while expensive, it is possible to get a PCVR experience completely wirelessly in multiplayer free roam.

The PCVR Option

One quick word on PCVR, then! This is VR powered directly by a separate PC. It's PCVR that powers many Booth VR experiences, but what you get from the power of the PC... comes with the bulk of the PC. Early free roam VR used backpack PCs to allow for tetherless play, but the dwindling manufacturing of these devices, along with the cost of maintaining them and the discomfort of the experience, has fewer owners every year choosing it.

vrCAVE's Been Doing This A While

vrCAVE actually got our start developing for backpack-powered free roam VR. We used the very first generation of these devices, and over 8 years we've built a suite of 8 ridiculously immersive VR escape room experiences just for the location-based VR industry. We were also fast to embrace the standalone technology, with all our escape rooms being playable on the original Quest right through to the Quest 3 — plus the VIVE Focus 3.

We built our games to be as accessible to as many people as possible — both the players and the business owners.

• Games are intuitive yet challenging, perfect for groups of people who want to get the most of their time in VR.
• Games are developed with big genre hooks — people can look at the poster selection and know right away what they want to do first
• The play space is on the lower end of free roam, at 340 square feet. You don't need a massive warehouse, you just need an empty room
• No proprietary hardware, so it's easy to buy what you need
•  Territorial exclusivity: not only will your audience not be able to play these games at home, they won't be able to play them at any other business in your territory.

We take a partner-first approach to location-based VR. If you're interested in installing free roam VR in your business in 2024, give us a shout and we'd be happy to help you!