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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!