How to Create a Virtual Reality Theme Park

The VOID, Ghostbusters, and how to create top notch end to end experiences in VR with James Jensen

I first heard about The VOID back in May 2015 when they released their teaser trailer, the video has since received over 4 million views and the attention of the entire universe of people involved in Virtual Reality.

The VOID which stands for Vision Of Infinite Dimensions is a an immersive VR experience that brings to mind theme-parks. But it is so much more than simply strapping on a headset.

I sat down James Jensen, Chief Visionary Officer at THE VOID (creators of Ghostbusters Dimension) and he tells us why watching people experience VR allows you to create top notch experiences. One of the most informative and interesting conversations I’ve had in VR yet.

How do you describe yourselves, as a theme park, amusement park, what’s your self description?

JJ: This is more like a futuristic movie theater, where you have different options and different worlds you can go to, but you pay a ticket price for each place you want to go to.

It’s more like a movie theater model where you go in to watch some things, see the place to go to explore some things, you fight aliens from some other planet, you know what I mean.

But it’s not just a movie experience, it’s everything that we can offer as far as the game platform goes too. So Avatar creation and customization, augmenting the experience every time that you go, it gets pretty fun.

tl;dr — Theme parks and amusement parks doesn’t quite encapsulate the experience. The Void is more like a movie theater.

What are some lessons you’ve learned?

JJ: I could go on for days, but just on the technology side, we had to build our equipment out of necessity, just because it doesn’t exist for a commercial application.

Like what?

JJ: Just our HMD for instance. All of the main HMD brands are just a brick that is on your face with straps on it and if you take a hit in that it actually smashes your face.

It’s not very great to have an HMD smashed into your face. We’ve had people come here that have scars on their noses from simulations that they have been in. So we designed our HMD after a bicycle helmet so it sits on your head so if you take a hit it bounces your head.

The visor pops up, it flips up and flips down so people can get out of VR real easy, if they have a problem they can flip it up and talk to an attendant, it’s all in one, it has the visuals, the microphone, headphones, and all controls that links to our backtop computer, and that computer itself we had to build from scratch because we had to build a machine that didn’t care if it was on battery power at all.

All the stuff that’s on the market now if it’s on battery power it tries to preserve the battery so it cuts processing power and it loses the half of quality, we had to build a machine that allows us to do that and also keep the machines online in between sessions so as internal battery and external battery swap in kind of system.

Then the vest has all the things that we can ever dream of. There is stuff there like the base and cap and those kind of things. It gives you some stimulation. We want to be the best at The Void, so our vest actually has 22 points of haptic feedback on it and all of it is directional. So for instance, I can shoot you with a proton beam in your chest and it’s all around your chest. It’s kind of the first of its kind.

There’s a lot of guns, at first we built one because we needed different types of effects on it, it had to be wireless, it had to sync really quickly with the equipment, to have an extra gun and sync it to the vest really quickly.

There is a lot of things, I don’t think people understand, from VR to actual operating commercial thing, there’s a whole bunch of stuff you have to consider, how you’re environment is gonna work, there is so much to do.

Take a weapon for instance, our guns and it’s first versions were tied specifically to an individual, but what happens when you hand that gun off to somebody else that doesn’t have one so they can defend in a certain area while I go find a map or something?

So when you make these elements in the world, in the virtual world, and mimic them exactly like they appear in the real world so I can hand that weapon over to my buddy, and now he gets all the points and receives all that stuff that happens with that gun and he has to take care of that gun. Then he can give it back to me.

Those stage environments right now are pretty rudimentary, they have foam walls and some effects that we haven’t even automated yet, but when you think about it, in 20 years , they would be called a holodeck. This will be a moving, breathing AI machine that’s anticipating your moves and providing arguments of the world, moving floors, moving wall systems, smell machines.

tl;dr — Most of the technology that was required for the experience doesn’t even exist. So they built it all themselves. Oh, and HMD’s are incredibly uncomfortable.

So you’re a manufacturing company along with an experienental company?

JJ: Yeah, that’s the craziest thing about this company, it’s the most complex one I’ve ever put together, because it’s like smashing five different companies together. We’re a game development studio, we have construction teams that actually build the sets and stages, and then we have web guys building our web applications and mobile that’s building our mobile applications for avatar creation.

It’s pretty intense but it’s an awesome system and since we all have this background, our founders are from all these other areas, we don’t have to learn so much, we just basically need to put it all together. We’re not doing a VR demo and down the road thinking “Oh, let’s build an app and slap that on it”, we’re creating all kinds of tie ends, your character in The Void exists and goes on trips, and comes back from those trips with items and things and you can upgrade and do all kinds of stuff.

tl;dr — Putting together a company like The Void is like smashing together five separate companies. Developers, construction guys, etc.

That’s awesome. Do you have any rules on the creation of experiences?

JJ: Oh man we have so many rules, and it’s only by putting thousands and thousands of people through our simulations that we are actually able to obtain that knowledge and that’s one of the things I’d like to point out. We do have patents on some of our technologies, we have 36+ patents on some of the things that we do, but for me our IP is really in our people and the knowledge that we gained in the last four years.

It’s the key that people actually get to experience this stuff, the stuff that you do in VR you have to understand how it affects majority of the population. We have people that are creating VR games and just tossing them on these game platforms and have no idea how it’s affecting people at home. At The Void we have the ability to actually watch hundreds of people going through these simulations and learn from them.

The Ghostbusters experience is actually dynamic in the way that it loads and unloads teams and does all the timing for each of the areas so we can get the throughput. It’s all dynamic, so basically however much time will you spend in that certain area changes the timing of the whole experience based on that, so that way we can have multiple groups in the same environment without them bumping into each other.

tl;dr — They’ve put tens of thousands of people through their experiences and they probably know more about how people experience true VR more than anyone out there.

Wow, that’s great. So you guys have an entire rulebook.

JJ: We do. We have tons of rules, and we’re building them every day. We change stuff all the time, learning stuff, even at Madame Tussaud’s Ghostbusters: Dimension. I think that’s the thing. Every day that passes, we learn more and more stuff and the only way to ever be able to obtain that knowledge is to hire my team here.

tl;dr — They know VR.

How did Ghostbusters Dimension come to be?

JJ: So that was cool, we did some Beta tests here and we actually had people pay to use our ticketing system, we did four rounds of ticketing and we sold like in 30 minutes every time.

Just to test our ticketing and reservation system. When we did that, there was a lot of interest from the first video that we sent out and one of the executive producers from Sony actually bought Beta tickets and brought his son out here without tellings us, showed up, went through the experience and he said “Hey btw, I’m from Sony”.

We started talking and it was the perfect fit, our conversations continued and we came up with a storyline that Curtis and Tracy Hickman a fourteen time New York Times bestselling author, that’s on our staff, they put together a storyline that kind of matched the old movie and some of the new stuff that they did and they loved it. It’s just kinda fit really well, I mean you’re putting on a proton pack and gun and it all matches our equipment and it was great.

It came together and we did the co-release with the movie, but it wasn’t a promotional VR thing. You have to pay to go to and Sony plans on making money on those installations and you’ll see more Ghostbusters installations happening over the next few months.

tl;dr — A Sony exec tried a Beta experience in The Void and one thing led to another.

That’s great, moving forward do you see expanding locations all over the world?

JJ: Yup, we’re already working in the US and internationally right now, we’ll have some announcements pretty soon. People are gonna start seeing how large The Void is actually.

tl;dr —Why are you so lazy?

One more question, What is the most successful experience and why do you think so?

JJ: I think the most successful experience that we have at The Void is always going to be the newest one that we have. Because we take all of the knowledge that we gained from our other experiences and we implement those lessons into next one, the next update.

“We have the IP that we are creating right now that’s going to blow the socks off the other people.”

I would say the Ghostbusters one is the most successful because we have better graphics, better imagery, better artifacts, new stage effects, we added scent to the Ghostbusters and it turned out awesome. It’s pretty awesome. So yeah, I would say each experience The Void releases is being the best experience. We have the IP that we are creating right now that’s going to blow the socks off the other people.

tl;dr — The best experience will always be the latest one because they implement all of their latest findings into that one.