Comment by purple-again | Hacker News Reader

Comment by purple-again | Hacker News Reader

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Augmented reality and or virtual reality “game consoles”. If I had a spare billion or three laying around I would buy up some nice spacious commercial real estate in all of the metro areas of the US. Construct the piping and glue to present a uniform framework for every single one of those locations. Think for now a single 20x20 square room, something achievable regardless of whether it was an old Best Buy or an old grocery store.

These locations become your PlayStation or game console. You need your own killer content like Zelda or something to get off the ground, but once you can offer development tools that offer access to such a large audience, the entrepreneurs will come and start building content for you.

You provide a set number of props like staircases, blocks, etc that can be arranged into a specific game rooms layout and then painted by the developers game giving you much more room than just a big open area to work with.

There are some really good POC’s out there, but it’s just a single location like a laser tag place servicing a single area. That’s not enough to build a critical mass of developers or players.

This has been the dream since consumer VR took off 5 years ago. It never materialized because it turns out people just don't care that much. The tech is impressive, but it simply isn't good enough to be compelling beyond the first 10 minutes of wow factor for most people. VR will remain a niche within a niche until the hardware is truly ready for the mainstream, which will require feather light fully wireless headsets with 100% FOV, depth perception, and perfect controller-free hand/pose tracking.

I have seen vr arcades similar to this, but only in super high traffic tourist areas. Orlando and Vegas both have places you can rent a vr booth. But I think you really need some place you can charge a lot and have a huge amount of potential customers constantly.

I remember this from back in the 90's when I was a kid. You'd get into this little platform and they'd lower an arm with a ring around you to keep you from walking out and hurting yourself. Then they put a heavy, bulky helmet on and gave you a pointer device to hold straight out at arms length for the entire time you played. It was super fun even with terrible graphics but by the end of it my arms and neck were awfully sore.

And as far as I can remember, my brother and I were the only two customers we ever saw in there during weekends and we went at least twice a month until it went out of business

I think you are on to something with that. I gave the Occulus experience a try at the World Trade terminal (both the Star Wars and Avengers experience) and it really felt like a type of interactive cinematic experience. We were given guns, the wind would blow in our face when we looked out of the helicopter, walked around the corridors, etc.

The whole space looked like it might have been 1200 square feet.

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