ILMxLAB: Pioneering Immersive Entertainment

[Music] all right hello hi my name is Molly oh I work for Isle MX lab as director of content and platform strategy first of all I'm supposed to make a couple of requests that electronic devices are turned off or too silent and that at the end of the talk you fill out this survey if you like it if you don't like it then don't so we're excited to be part of the new GDC vision track which kind of invites contributors to sort of gaze into the crystal ball and make predictions about the future and then those will be put in the GDC vault and then years from now people can look at it and laugh at however wrong about everything so making predictions particularly hard I think about things like VR and AR and and mixed reality because there's still

so much in their infancy that it's really hard to speculate on how they will affect our lives in the future astronomer and author Clifford Stoll famously wrote discount the fawning techno burble about virtual communities computers and networks isolate us from one another this non-place lures us to surrender our time on earth a poor substitute it is this virtual reality he wrote that in 1995 and in now notorious Newsweek article on why the internet will never take off it actually took courage for him to put something like that you know in writing and he's been mocked for it ever since so I'm counting on two things today that it'll take at least a few years for you figure out that I'm wrong about everything and secondly I didn't put anything in writing I just put a bunch of pictures on here so so speaking of the internet early visions of shared

via our communities and worlds like 9090 the 1992 novel Snow Crash which introduced that Metaverse we're certainly influenced by impressions of the Internet at the time and oddly in spite of the vast technological advances in social changes over the last 25 years the pop culture predictions for what VR will be in the future haven't really changed much so from the Metaverse and snow crash to you know the oasis in the upcoming ready player one film there's really a common theme here of the future of VR sort of as a as a walled off substitute world that we escape into while outside the real world sort of descends into a dystopian nightmare maybe one reason why this prediction hasn't really changed much is because we tend to consider VR in isolation but when you look at truly transformative shifts in technology and culture they often don't stem from a

single technological advancement but from the Clash of multiple at first seemingly unrelated breakthroughs that then combine into a catalyst for change so for example it's it's easy to think that our current world is a product of the Internet age but that's too simplistic the internet certainly played a big part in it but our popular culture was built on the confluence of many many different technical developments take something as simple as a video chat filter the technology required to make something like this possible is much more than just the Internet this portable computing high-speed wired wireless connectivity miniaturized cameras multi-touch screens real-time rendering face recognition feature tracking and many more so to look at VR in isolation when making future predictions is too reductive as well at ILM xlab virtual reality experiences are

a big part of what we create but we chose to call our mission something broader immersive entertainment because we believe that storytelling and world building that places you at the center that lets you step inside the story and become part of the world will develop into many different experiences in different places virtual real and everywhere in between two core concepts of the original Metaverse idea are a persistent social world and persistent avatars so in most fiction about VR the only way to access a virtual world and to have agency in it as an avatar is through a headset right now in games many people enjoy building up an avatar over you know hundreds or even thousands of hours in some cases you know with all its stats and possessions but being in VR commands a hundred percent of your attention and

many of us can only afford to completely tune out the real world for a couple of hours a day at the most so to start with why not instead engage that same virtual world in different ways throughout the day so if you're really into that space Wizarding World then you know on the way home you could on your cell phone have like an AR geolocation experience where you collect some ingredients then at home on the couch you know with your tablet you use those ingredients to you know crafts and potions or acquire new spells with a game controller on your TV you can you know fly your wizard spaceship through an asteroid field to the Wizarding championship and then for the really intense sort of wizard duels you jump into VR and use your like newly learned spells the virtual world and your identity in it remain the same but the way you interact with that virtual world is flexible enough to adjust to your desired depth of engagement from

moment to moment there are non VR games that have already explored this to some success but these experiences don't have to be exclusively a digital either you could go to a themed hotel or escape room or even a theme park and be recognized as your persistant avatar with its unique history and traits and participate in storylines that connect across these in a themed location or theme park offers a level of immersion that you can't create at home even in VR you can have face-to-face social interactions with your family or friends walk among elaborate physical sets actress and costumes sensational practical effects thrill rides and in the future those location-based experiences could even be enhanced by mixed reality glasses to add magical and impossible elements into an already elaborate fantasy world if you want you could participate in this out of home adventure as your avatar and when you

return home your storyline continues in the digital world the stories who experienced in the physical world could become part of that same ongoing biography our homes are changing too as iOS as IOT connectivity is catching on cloud and edge computing will empower everyday objects with more information and abilities the individual object doesn't have to be complex or expensive a smart speaker isn't very smart on its own it can't do speech recognition natural language processing speech synthesis without the cloud server that does the computational heavy lifting but when connected that little speaker not only has much of the knowledge of the Internet at its disposal it knows who you are what music and podcasts you like what time you should leave for the airport those same devices can become access points for persistent virtual worlds as well and I think especially toys will

follow this trend pretty soon you can have a toy droid that understands what you say answers intelligently and knows you and your avatar all without requiring expensive onboard electronics because its brain is actually in the cloud this could even be a character that exists seamlessly both as a physical toy in the real world and as a digital character in the virtual world and remembers your shared activities in both mixed reality glasses we'll take this one step further allowing fully digital characters to cross between the real and virtual worlds Mr characters and physical smart toys could even interact with one another streaming television real-time rendering and speech synthesis could allow for linear content to be personalized on the fly so that an episode of your favorite show features a cameo of your personal droid or even references the latest

adventures you had in VR outside the home self-driving cars may well become an entertainment hub and platform what better time to dive into a virtual world then when you're trapped in a metal box that you don't even have to steer anymore so moments of sort of tedium and isolation could actually become opportunities for entertainment and social interaction in a matter of years not decades the same 3d models that are necessary to for self-driving cars and autonomous drones to navigate our cities could actually provide the foundation for taking mixed reality out into the street and you could allow to build whole fictional world that exists layered on top of the real one digital AI characters and even friends avatars could join you in everyday life there

might be big AR social events where people gather together for a spectacle seen through mixed reality glasses like a multiplayer amour narrative which throughout the week sent participants all over the city for the individual adventures only to bring them together in the same square for the big finale on you know on the weekend all of that may feel quite far away and there are definitely technical hurdles to overcome which are not only beyond our studio but even beyond our industry to solve on our own so there's back into architecture Kandice 2018 you can't avoid it it's theirs like back into architecture there's improved sensing and mapping fast connectivity plausible AI characters and so on and without a doubt by the time we get there the ideas I just presented will seem quaint and outdated and new ideas and you know

imagination that we haven't even dreamed up yet ball emerge I think it's also important to briefly mention social responsibility this is not just about the obvious dangers of technology that allows people to live in different realities because to an extent that's already doing like happening right now but I think that's also you know just a more basic dimension to that there's lots of tangible useful applications of these technologies that I mentioned for education healthcare civil engineering and so on know what I've been talking about is just entertainment and as much as I like the idea of filling the real world with magical virtual things we can't also solve some of the most basic societal problems then I don't think we've really earned the right to use technology to make reality look nicer than it is or cover up problems we'd rather not think about you know you can imagine that you'd end up sort of in a black mirror version of you know where

you're walking down the street with your virtual pets past the homeless tents on the sidewalk and that's I don't think we want to really end up there so anyway that future may be a ways away but I think the tools to begin mixing real and virtual worlds are already available to everyone right now and I'm not just talking about like a Ark it in a Ark or last year when I moved back to San Francisco I had to furnish an empty apartment and so the first thing I did just for fun really was to make a rough 3d model off the flat and I just took a couple of dozen snapshots and fed them through photogrammetry software and then I blocked out the furniture arrangement with a few cubes based on the measurements from the furniture store website and then I put on my VR headset and I stood in my live in my real living room and at the same time in my virtual living room just to see all that layout would feel and all that was required for that was really a point-and-shoot camera

a laptop and a consumer VR headset at the moment we're still restricted by cables and sensors but within a hardware generation or 2 untetherd inside out tracking headsets might free us up from that and I'm actually looking forward to just making different skins from my apartment so I can then freely walk around in the VR spaces initially this probably has to be done manually but I think very quickly there will be tools games and experiences that procedurally match up walls and objects of the right size between fictional and real world both for VR and mr so your armchair could become a captain's chair and a spaceship your coffee table a control console and your wall a window to space eventually it's not just your living room you could map and Skinner take a few coolers or trash bins out into your back yard scan the environment and props with your phone or headset and skin them like the fictional world of your choice then invite a few of your friends over

with their untethered headsets and now you're together running and dodging behind cover both in the real world and in the fictional version of it having a story adventure playing cypher VR or M or paintball or fighting side-by-side against waves of AI enemies Network this with the backyard of a friend in another city and in the virtual world her and your backyard become the same place her friends in her backyard your friends and yours moving freely hanging out playing games in physical and virtual spaces simultaneously the relationship between physical world and virtual worlds may turn out to be very fluid one virtual space may connect to multiple real places and a single real location can have many virtual layers to choose from it actually seems unlikely that we will converge on a single Metaverse when we can choose from many worlds or even customize our own

so as technology advances the digital and the real world don't have to remain two separate places the meta vs. doesn't have to stay trapped inside a headset can end up being all around us we're gonna move on to the panel discussion now and recently I'll MX lab and the void using epics Unreal Engine created Star Wars secrets of the Empire an experience that is a first step in exploring what future immersive multiplayer content that mixes physical and virtual worlds can be so while I play the trailer please welcome to the stage Camille salucci head of production at the void Judah Graham senior producer at Epic Games and a moderator for this discussion David Collins sound mixer and editor at Skywalker Sound [Applause] [Music]

I have an assignment for you the rebellion needs you and we don't have much time you must walk together you must not fail [Music] in disguise your team's mission is to recover imperial intelligence critical to our survival [Music] here with me the rest of you get on that skin do your best actin Mariel looks like you'll have to fight your way out [Music] what is that this could be a threat to

our entire existence good morning everyone thank you so much for joining us this morning and that and thank you very much mone for that in fact that fascinating talk that was really it's very exciting and thank you for joining us here at GDC today I am very excited to host this conversation with Moe and Camille and Judah you just saw the trailer for Star Wars secret to the Empire just curious how many of you have experienced first of all how many of you heard secrets them you've heard of secrets of the Empire and the void and how many of you have experienced secret to the Empire okay great great great great well before we get started I want to tell you a little bit about who I am and why I'm up here so I am a sound at a recording mixer at Skywalker Sound with a long history of working in interactive I was at LucasArts for over a decade

PlayStation and in digital health at Achille interactive labs so I'm here because I am so passionate about this I experienced it recently at the Glendale Galleria which just opened yeah my wife and I went through together and I was just totally blown away even having worked on it a little bit I've voiced some some stormtrooper characters in the experience but it did not prepare me for sort of the hyper reality of the experience I wanted to start just by having you introduce yourselves to to everyone here in the audience sure well I'm I'm Camille salucci and I have a fairly long background in visual effects I feel like I was born at Industrial Light and Magic and got some good legs there and went out ended up being a couple of the big credits would be I was the visual effects producer on Titanic I've done about 35 films more recently the walk that Robert Zemeckis directed and was the line

producer on the little prints for those of you who had a chance to see it on Netflix so I come from that background of animation and visual effects more recently I learned about I wanted to work in VR and sort of transition my career and literally two years ago I was paid a full price ticket sitting at GDC learning as much as I can and wondering if someday maybe I would have enough knowledge to sit on a panel I'm not sure about the formal but I guess I'm here so anyway and then I was at Google spotlight stories for those of you who know about their VR storytelling and I've produced a couple of things there before the void came and asked me to join them as had a production which is just I'm just in the month and a half so since I've been there very cool so I'm Judah Graham I've senior producer at Epic Games I was with ILM xlab for several years my background is mainly in games I've spent

I don't know in the last 20 years in games working at Red Storm back in Raleigh and then I I decided to come out and work with Activision for a good bit it's got a Call of Duty and then after Call of Duty I I was so fascinated when I put my first headset on and and saw the potential of VR so made a natural fit for me to go work with Vickie and the crew at Island mechs lab for a while and when we got the opportunity to go down and kind of check out the void it was a brand new platform at the time that was one of those kind of transfer transformative moments where you you just walked through it and you thought oh my gosh this is this is where the future of a VR and entertainment is it's the hyper aspect of it that I think really kind of pulls you in and so once once we had the opportunity to work on that it was

just fantastic I mean it's kind of it's definitely on that forward-thinking you know future of where this entertainment can go you mentioned hyper-reality just now III mentioned it as well can you just talk a little bit for those that don't know about what hyper reality is at the void when you talk about that sure so the idea being that to start with first of all I want to acknowledge one thing and that was Curtis Hickman was supposed to be here today in the panel and some of you might have come to see Curtis and unfortunately rarely do we have so much rain in San Francisco that flights can't get in but he he couldn't get here so Judah is graciously joined us which is fantastic thank you and he knows a lot more about the producing of this for sure but in terms of hyper reality as as some of you might know Curtis as a magician and his idea is always about being able to you know

suspend disbelief and do whatever we can to create an illusion that your brain believes and so VR a VR headset on its own is pretty incredible but when you add things like physical location walls you can physically touch heat that you feel on Mustafar or wind that you feel or missed or rumbles in the floor it really goes a long way towards making it an experience that is completely hopefully convincing for the brain to say I am here and so hyper reality takes it to that next view next level of from sort of virtual reality and the headset to a full sensory experience that people do for people to enjoy the one-to-one is so powerful when you experience that I mean your brain is telling you what you're seeing and then you're experiencing with all of your other senses I would just blown away by it and Judy can you talk a little bit about your work with epic and working together

to bring that to life so epic obviously is is has one of the best platforms and it's it's it's true interest is really in helping to stay on the cutting edge and partner with companies like ILM xlab and we I think for for a big part of what the void project in terms of the challenges that we faced in development from from ILM x.x lab there's a lot of firsts that we had to go into this so first time for putting a headset on and tracking people through a vr space but being you know driven by motion capture as well so you have multiplayer along with the avatars being driven in a virtual space on tethered so all of those things that were kind of first I think it was it made a lot of sense for fir epic games to kind of dive in and

really see you know what types of things could potentially add tech back to the engine for for the long term so since this was really one of those like it was just a challenge I think on all aspects of trying to handle the amount of data that we had to process and so from from epic just kind of being able to step step in and and give some consulting and some advice walked us through the process for for animation and then bringing characters and doing blend States and it just it became a natural fit not to mention you know building a a virtual space that is one-to-one with a physical space that you walk through that creates just such a such an immersive platform inai experienced fear I experienced you know exhilaration joy I was physically touching things you

know grabbing solving puzzles going through everything I mean that really does seem like a monumental leap forward but in the ER yeah and I think one of the things that that I love most about the void is that there is that that level of like the one-to-one where where things really match up but then there's another level of like illusion and sort of magic that sits on top of that and so my my brother was a very intelligent person he works in medical research and has a PhD you went to see their previous experience that Ghostbusters one in New York and and afterwards I talked to him and I said like oh yeah I did the same thing in a warehouse in LA and he said how could you do that in a warehouse there it has to be at least like four stories for the elevator right I basically had to tell them like you were never in an elevator you know that's that's really for me that that

highlighted like the magic of this kind of VR that it can create memories that feel as real as real experiences that you've had because the blend is totally seamless I mean I I mentioned I went through the experience with my wife and I was just like you know at one point you you have to cross this chasm and you're convinced it's real because you're getting all of the sensory information plus visuals and I'm just like yeah I'm holding your hand as we're walking through two storm troopers holding hands it's totally normal no big deal there they don't know we're spies but yeah you really are crossing the chasm there with the one-to-one in a way you know one one thing that one traditional tool that storytellers have had for immersive entertainment is control over camera and when I went through it I was really struck by how not only is it obviously in VR it's completely 3d but you're telling a story and an immersive story but not only do not have control of the camera therefore

you know what I'm looking at what I'm focused on but it's a group of people all focused on different things how do you see that what some might see initially is a disadvantage how do you see that as an advantage to this kind of hyper reality and as a creative tool that's a that's a really good question I think social aspects of VR is one of the things that's kind of lagged through through VR basically coming into the spotlight and mainstream but I think being able to give I mean one of the one of the really cool things about the voidance platform is that you can give you can drive individual experiences as much as you can the social and group aspect of the experience so where you have you can have full conversations because you're miked up and you're talking to the person next to you you're seeing them you you know how to navigate around them but at the same time you can you know as

as developers for VR we can send individual experiences whether it's auditory or because you're not truly in the exact exact same space you can send visual differences so I could be looking at one thing that's completely different than say Camila or you and and then driving different social aspects of that - so you can you can part ways and then come back and have like like group effort team team driven experiences where you're you're you're you know one one group on one side is actually solving one problem that it converges and then you get back together and meet it a common goal so it's like I think the void having that untethered aspect I think is just a good driver for social I think also on what you're saying about sort of turning that to your advantage one thing I think for for these kinds of

immersive storytelling experiences that as sort of the storytellers have to have a little bit like looser grip on at you you can't you know in a movie you control literally everything what people look at but what the nice thing about this medium is that you create more of a narrative framework but the experience that every person going through it as is still their personal experience you know people do different things they go different places they look at different things and that's sort of how how people experience the real world is fall right and said I think what and that's certainly true as sort of we progressed you like you know bigger social vr worlds I think we can't really necessarily control the the narrative and shouldn't try to control the narrative to the last you know detail but create basically stories and story frameworks that leave enough room for individuals to have their own story in that yeah I would say one of the things that a term that I learned actually from Vicki is we

aren't you know it's been looked at for a long time that about storytelling and what we're really moving into in this new world is it's more about story living you know we are creating spaces and worlds where people have a chance to live out their own stories and and create their own stories within a framework that we design so it's it's got some complexity to it because there's definitely a narrative that we want people to experience but we want to give them enough freedom to experience it in a personal way and in that in that way our hope is especially with the social aspect which we're really we love and love to have that part of it because we think it's a critical part in VR in the future is allowing people to have that experience with each other and carry memories so in essence we're really making memories is what I like to think about I think that that is

successful even with this because when you have people coming out of the void experience they've they start actually telling their own stories of what happened they're going like oh and then he shot at this guy and I was doing this thing and you know and so they had their own story within that framework well let's talk about that framework and get into that a little bit because the framework you're still having to build it and kind of anticipate what the boundaries are you know and create in certain cases maybe the illusion of choice versus actual choice you know creating set pieces or arenas or something and obviously storytelling film books there isn't choice it's a guided narrative do you see that going away and breaking down completely or is that illusion of choice always going to be a part of even something as open as as a group experience in immersive VR I'd say from my perspective I think I think that you're to have one of the things that I think people enjoy is being part of a world that has been created and been curated by someone

and so certainly from our perspective or I should say from my perspective I'm still learning everything about the full void perspective being a bit new there but what I can say is that I think that curated experience creating those worlds is important and so giving people and and trying to think about what the choice is one of the one of the terrific things we have with the void is we we get data from our users now in in a real way and in a significant way we actually have people lining up to take surveys which is sort of unheard of usually you're begging people to take the survey like like at GDC allow surveys but there but often at the void waiting because people want to express what happened they don't know how to they want somewhere to share it somewhere to talk about it and I've even seen people who don't know each other come out being like close like talking as if they were really good friends and they didn't know each other when they walked in so but I think if it's if it's just left where

there's no curation from my perspective it's it's kind of a little bit on the choose-your-own-adventure level where that might take off for a bit but I think it often comes back to a curated experience interesting and now in terms of world-building say versus a Content play right choose-your-own-adventure I mean that to me thinks about branching story paths which means you have to build all of these different story paths do you see how do you see that balance moving forward then in terms of the world building being the appeal or actually having customized stories for everyone that goes through or some limited version of that anyone any thoughts on that yeah good good no I mean I think we're where we're still so early in exploring that and I think that there's definitely really interesting developments that that can happen in that field over the next like 10 years or so let's say because one thing I think it's it's impossible to to create

the kind of depth of experience as both story and worldwide why is that there could support something like you know the Metaverse idea content creator perspective you can't write like hundreds of hours of branching narratives right so I think we we have to figure out things like letting users participate like you know in a meaningful way without breaking the fiction so user-generated content becoming part of that and procedural content and so procedural world building I think is something that is is really exciting and you look at something like no man's sky that you know not only created like this enormous universe but created it with like a you know six gigabyte like footprint you know and so I think if we can for example figure out like how to how to describe most of our in a procedural way then you can say okay I need a hundred more square walls with Mustafar and you can you can do that in an efficient way and and it's

much more experimental but I think there's there's even interesting work starting to happen on procedural narratives on story engines on creating systems that can create narrative situations and so I think if we can if we can sort of push that further then there's an opportunity there to build worlds that are really complex that that can sustain themselves where you don't as a story creator have to create like thousands and thousands of hours of content it's really interesting and one of the things you brought up in your talk too was this sort of cross-platform idea of feeding that customizable content do you any any thoughts that you can give us about a future vision you may have for that how how people will experience that via cross-platform and then go into an immersive experience are you talking about form being multiple platforms whether it's your your phone or yeah so I mean we've when when we started working on the void and trying

to come up with a really good design and something that would be engaging for the masses it's one of the things that's really challenging is well especially from a games background we all know what drives gaming and and what drives storytelling and and how to compel a player or a user drug going through the experience we know how to pull them along through through choice and design and and layout and I think one of the things that was really tough with this is we kept trying to pull back and simplify because there's an education process I mean we would do some user tests and people would put the headset on and they get lost they didn't know what to do it was the sensory overload of this new world this new experience for the first time it was it became very difficult for for them to just kind of oh what do i do do I can I touch oh I can't touch this and then they have to turn around and sit

down and kind of then oh they were missing dialogue if we had dialogue that was too complex so I think there's a phase of both adopt is part of the adoption process but there's a phase of getting people comfortable in that environment and making sure that they're enjoying it and can function with it and then automatically the next step for them is more complex choice or or like diverging storylines I think at that point then they could they could go in two different directions or so as this matures and what's exciting about I think the Void platform and what Epic Games is is doing long term by supporting these types of hyper-reality platforms are cutting edge platforms is by by doing that and supporting that we're learning how fast this adoption is happening and staying on the cutting edge so that these these features can be

used by the masses and then as a whole I believe those all contribute back to the main goal which is you know how this progresses and if in the future one of the things just real quick on on cross platform that we're excited about and we're actively talking about so its future but I don't think it's you know 20 years in the future but one of the things you'll start seeing for sure is the interrelated content across platforms so you know talking with an AR experience that you might have on your phone that for someone who's really into that world there will be connections and tangents we're working across various companies to find the ways where those things connect or you might have you know you might experience something at the void but then have an opportunity to go deeper into that world at home with your own VR headset so really working on how can we connect while having someone who is only going to do the one experience have that be complete enough

for them but someone who is interested in going across experiences or is is is a real fan of that work making it rewarding for them to see interconnections and have a deeper and richer experience and I think it's important again not to not to think about sort of these virtual walls are something that only exists in a VR headset you know you can you can very easily imagine asymmetrical experiences like especially right now I think a lot of people that are developing for VR are sort of struggling with the with the size of the market and if you look at stuff like VR chat that you know took off like a lot it's the the reason why it became so popular is because you didn't have to be in a VR headset to participate you know at any point in time a large number of the people in VR chat are actually just on a desktop watching other people that have headsets and so you could easily imagine designing experiences where you know if you if you want to be a Jedi and have a lightsaber you're and VR but if you just

want to run around with a blaster you can do that with a game controller and those people being in the same world and and still having those interactions some people in VR some people outside of we are it's interesting to would to think about cross-platform versus the idea of the newness of the experience every time someone walks in to say secret to the Empire versus looking forward because do you see cross-platform maybe is even a training tool to to experience these these worlds that you're building for example I had no idea where I was going and that was part of the illusion and part of the experience was the unveiling of the world but I could see maybe with cross-platform knowing exactly where I'm going if I if I step into it because I'm already so invested is that something that you you're thinking about in the future or how does that work possibly as a training tool for milling up I think you're absolutely right and and as Judith said sort of especially at the moment people are not used to VR and so trying to tell them a complex story in VR can be really overwhelming like there

it's really hard to sort of drive a complicated narrative I think audiences mature and be able to take on more of that but but if you can basically set up a storyline outside of you know that that location-based VR experience and people already know kind of what it's about then that can complement those those more visceral you know like location-based VR experiences and in particular if you then can have a persistent character that goes across those things so you're already not only invested in the world video investors sort of in your role in the world and you play that character both at home and in a location-based experience I think it'd be interesting if I can just happiness and in Tim's keynote yesterday you know and he was talking about how the the adoption of clap cross platform the way we were able to you know fortnight is is kind of pioneering some of this especially on the the various platform so cross play but between all of these various platforms I think that

is a real breakthrough that will then just add more adoption into this type of space so if if somebody is if you go to the to the void and you you go through the experience and there's something that you can take away from that and it's on your mobile phone and it drives the engagement you're configuring whatever your blaster or your lightsaber or or something else and then you're you're the social aspect of that now I'm sharing it with you where we're texting pictures back and forth or we're in the same I don't know if there's a subset platform from from the board but but it's it's the takeaways that drives the engagement and then then you're going back into maybe you're at home on your PSP are and you put your headset on and you're able to configure your character that way as well so I think all of those technologies kind of converging together in a way that that that drives better cross-platform support for for for the individual experience is is

and a long-term I think it's it's just going to help the void and those types of hyper reality experiences mature a lot faster um one of the things I was just going to say it's we have some interesting statistics so far from from the void and it's it's basically we're doing as I said people are lining up for surveys and we found that 25 percent have no experience at all with VR it's the first time they've even heard about it they didn't know what it was at in any form twenty another 25 percent have very little experience like they might have heard about it but they might not have experienced it then 31 percent have some experience and that some experience often is cardboard or they walk by you know one of the best by demos or an airport demo or something like that and then 19 percent have a lot of experience so in some ways for me the numbers in terms of people being exposed to it

we're a little higher than I had originally anticipated I thought it might be like 80 percent didn't know anything and you know maybe 20 percent and it broke down further so I think more and more people I mean it's it's it's it's blooming faster than we might have anticipated but we still have a have a ways to go and I think the void is a is a great way that's allowing people to enter this world for the first time and hopefully then take it on broader experiences well I will tell you you know from my experience going to going to the mall to basically go to this new opening Glendale Galleria reminded me of when I was eight years old and couldn't wait to get to the gold mine which was an arcade you know that I used to go to and just obsessed over because that's where the magic was that's where the new cutting edge was the technology I had that same experience as a grown man going to secrets of the Empire and I couldn't wait to go back and see everything that I missed because I knew there was so

much and all I could think of and stop I couldn't stop myself from obsessively thinking about where it's gonna go what's next and everything that I suddenly had to look forward to that I didn't even know I had to look forward to I could sit here and ask you guys questions all all morning but we have a roomful of full of people that I'm sure have their own questions so I wanted to open it up to the room for questions we have time to answer if any of you have questions for our panelists there's a mic here and I'm mic right there well someone's walking up I'm going to give you guys one statistic that was also really has been fascinating for us and not necessarily what we expected we opened in the Westfield London and that mall and we thought we were gonna get a lot of foot traffic from the mall which we are getting for sure but let me see seventy one point six percent of the people coming to the Westfield Mall London it's their first time going to that mall and the reason they came is because of the void yeah I've done both

the Ghost Busters in New York experience and did the Anaheim one at Downtown Disney when that opened up for Star Wars so both amazing and loved the hyper reality with the various effects I guess the question is I want to do more so is there like a sequel coming out or I don't know if you can say anything but I guess gonna need to do secrets of Empire right again and again and again but just curious like what's next well we haven't announced our slate yet but we will be announcing this late and there is definitely more to come for sure and there are more locations to come in lots of places so you won't necessarily have to go to New York only New York or Los Angeles hopefully there'll be something closer for you as well yeah I just want to say great work got a chance to go through the experience in Orlando you know really fantastic a lot of great milestones you know being overcome so great job but I'm curious about first was the Ghostbusters and now it's a Star Wars what challenges do you see of authoring themed worlds

outside of established and well-known themed worlds well you know this is a this is a journey that we're all on together we're all experiences our we just keep putting our feet out there and experiencing we are going to be and I can't announce the title but I can't say we are going to be introducing an original IP into the marketplace in the next few months and as we do that it's going to be a lot of learning you know what is it like to introduce an original piece of IP that doesn't have a hundred million dollar ad campaign behind it where we're trying to get people to know about it and and we're you know we're still a startup you know so we don't have a hundred million dollars to put into advertising so it's good we're stay tuned we're all learning together and we'll find out because we are we're going to be introducing that that's probably that's the next piece that will be coming out hey this sounds awesome I haven't experienced it myself but I'm a chief engineer and it sounds like something even I would pay for so that sounds great I'm curious about

right now it sounds like it's very very niche and kind of a high-end experience very customized it seems to me like we have the tools and capabilities where it could theoretically trickle down where someone with moderate computer experience would be able to do something like what Noelle was talking about take a picture of your house and then build an experience in your own home some like a fun house or a haunted house where people could come in I'm just curious what your guys's thoughts are on the path to that how long would that take and some tools that might be in place to start doing that on our own I think that will happen fairly quickly I mean I think the you know if you really wanted to do that just with it whether tethered has said you could do that now it's just the you know length of your cable will sort of limit how far you can walk but but I think as you get into like untethered VR headsets and and certainly also like mixed reality headsets meant for the home I think that'll that'll happen very quickly because they they

rely on you know effectively like inside our tracking slam algorithms that create like a point cloud of you know things around you it becomes a question of like whether that's exposed to you necessarily immediately or not but but even if it's not I think you'll you'll have the tools I mean particular people in this industry have the tools very quickly to to make a map of the the real and then in a game engine build a world that matches that you know and just calibrate your position to that and and I think you'll very quickly be able to sort of experiment with that and if that if those types of headsets become successful I think in particular like mixed reality headsets very very quickly have to rely on the idea of having having a map of the world around you right you want to be able to put a virtual object on a table so it has to know there's a table there and so I think we're talking like you know a matter of like two three years where you'll be able to do some of these

things in the tool set to four four four epic games and anybody can go download Unreal Engine it doesn't take much computer power to actually run the engine itself you can there's a lot of construction tools in there you can build some of these experiences of this I think the the the one key piece that you would need to actually just look at VR and it would be the headset whether it's the oculus survive or something along those lines but that's it's it's my kids are doing it at home with it they're building their room and then being able to dress it up the way that they want to so it's it's not not too far that you'll be able to have objects and placement and I'm a multiplayer and I think I think user-generated content is such a big part of culture now you know like so so I think it'll it'll naturally the market will drive experiences that allow people to participate in the in the world creation in the storytelling thanks and one of

the thing that struck me was when you're talking about the memories that people were having of these things that you know our virtual is have you looked into educational experiences where you could really bring someone into some historical events and and really have it strike a student that would stick with them much better than just reading the book yes it's it's absolutely educational as definitely on our roadmap some of the stuff you guys are doing a super super cool one thing I'm really curious about is how often you guys have repeat like visitors to some of your centers is that a common thing we do have repeat and we are learning more about our repeat you know most recently in Glendale we've only been open since Friday and we already have a 10% repeat rate which is surprising for us so people are coming back and and we hope they do have those kind of people kind of mentioned what brings them back I think a lot of it is people experience something and then they want to

experience it with other friends or they want to bring their brother or they want to bring their sister or you know I went through with my 83 year old mom who held on to me the whole time and Stormtroopers holding hands again yep it's happening you know so I was just gonna say and the first thing she wanted to do was okay now that I've been so overwhelmed I want to do it again now to like start to find other things so I think it's both those that go ahead do do you have ID I just think the the medium is so transformative and and if you it's not something that you can watch a commercial or a TV show or see an ad and you just don't understand it when you see it on the flatscreen so it's not until you put the headset on and you actually go into it and and especially with the void because it's tactile so you're touching things you're smelling the the ash in the air I think that is when people put that on it's it's so in-your-face ground breaking you can't help but say I've got to try this

again did it was that the way I really remembered it like from yesterday so but I think also as audience that's become sort of more sophisticated you know that that sort of first vowel effect that'll battle over the next couple years I think will start sort of wearing off you can rely on that anymore being like the the thing that makes it amazing and so I think as we design future experiences we really have to think about that lot what makes it rewarding to come back you know what how can we make sure that when you come back you actually have a different experience that is just as rewarding yeah absolutely no we've got to continue to raise the bar each each step of the way I look at you know visual effects for example even looking you know looking at things like you know the original Star Wars or looking at you know Titanic or any of these groundbreaking films you know when you look back at them the the general audience now can see like oh that doesn't that doesn't look real anymore but when they first saw it it looks real and we're gonna have the same thing in

VR hi huge Star Wars fans been seeing David around for years so it's cool to see you here one of my questions is so one of the one of the issues here is footprint right the amount of space that it takes to do these experiences and how customize those things are have you considered just kind of fooling the user into going back through certain areas and re scanning them or even rescanning the entire experience for other kind of IP you know like being able to reuse the space in ways that could we've remember absolutely I mean part the only thing that makes it possible to scale which you know one of the things about the void is it's also a place where we're starting to see a business model that might that makes sense or hopefully will make sense and so so the only way to do that is to scale a business and the only way to scale a business in real terms is to start to come to some sort of standardization so the footprint of the void you know is now basically the layout of our what we call our stages is

basically solidified and now what we're doing is exactly what you suggest and you're right on the right track is is how do we reskin our experiences and make them unique and exciting every time it's it's the balance between how do we do that and also make something scalable that makes sense in a business world yeah the challenge of reusing without having it feel feel like it yes exactly if I can say one thing there too because with with secrets of the Empire I don't have you have you done the experience they've gone through so it kills me because I just moved from Orlando to New York and I moved to or to New York after they opened the Orlando experience so I got to do the the Ghostbusters one then have not been able to do the Star Wars one so it's star well it's good that that you were able to do the Ghostbusters one because it kind of helps get an idea and raising the bar one of the things that we really tried to do on this we wanted to lengthen the experience it was going from eight or so minutes to like 11 or 12 minutes so we had to reuse the space the physical space the actual stage itself or three times so we get I don't know if

I'm giving away too much here so stopping but four groups of four going through the experience at any given time having their own original experience as you wrap around and come back and you have the spoiler alert have have the the end battle at the very end I'll just leave it at that you're actually going through a space that you were just in five minutes prior to on a skiff going into the vault so we're reusing and trying to lengthen the experience I mean basic sense you know it's even doing about in ghostbusters where you're in the hallway you get into an elevator you go up five floors you get back out you're so on the same hallway yeah I peaked so they just yeah I mean the parallel to to game design I mean level designers have to do this as well you know reuse clever reuse of space we use it assets but you have no idea just really really fast and oh actually we

have more people away let's ask more there's a that scene near the end where there's a certain villain character that appears which gave me politicians while I was doing that I'm starting to have relive that now if it becomes a very strong memory more than say watching it in a film it tell you what you're saying to the fact that this is you know in prints and your memory more I've actually experiencing it then watching it on a film as is totally true then also the fact that smell is introduced really helps transport you there too how do you figure out like which smells or are there certain smells that are more attuned to I I smell burnt stuff and that was out all of them or they're more like I miss anything oh and the other thing is another thing that affects repeatability is points like having a score for ghostbusters there was a score was there a score for for Star Wars because I would definitely do it again because I think I totally messed up the first time we intentionally did not want to do that because we wanted to keep this more of an as a story type of experience so we

intentionally kept the the scoring and any any anything that would kind of lend towards more gamified type of experience we kind of pulled back on that however we've had enough and you know doesn't know this yet because he's over he's he's not a he's a nothing but we've had so much requests that very question that we are while it's not necessarily a game like the the a game score exactly and how many hits and where are the hits and different points right there we are there is something that's going to be introduced that that has that a component like that coming in the next couple months we have 30 seconds left so last question here and then I do I understand you are gonna be available for for questions afterwards yeah well go to wherever the wrap-up areas there's a quick question so it's a great work to bring all the physical feelings into the the experience like the touch and heat and rain those things have you thinking about bringing like

real world experience into this experience like your cell phone like you can call someone or taking a selfie of your virtual world and having a group photo those type of things we are working on some of that not so much that people take their own photos with their cameras but in ability it's one of the things that we're we're looking at is how can we do some in headset and some other types of of people being able to bring the experience with them so that technology is being worked on now thank you all very much for coming please give a round of applause to our panelists thank you and have a great day [Applause]