Jordan Williams, co-founder of Upward VR, provides insight and advice for current and prospective VR Arcade owners.
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One of the big things obviously when you're thinking about starting a VR arcade is, "How do you actually setup the play space?" There's a ton of different options. I'm going to show you three things that we did here at Upward VR, that might help you make decisions on what's best for your arcade. For example, this is our room scale station. It's about eight by eight, plenty of room to swing around, walk around for your customers, so they're not hitting the walls, and they've got plenty of space to move around. The wall material, we actually just used drywall with a little wood, and painted over it. There's obviously other options like curtains, and we considered acrylic at one point, but it's too expensive.
This was a pretty easy and simple setup for us. This beam across, what that does is it allows us to connect to the computer up, and hide all of the cabling so all you see here is just this one Vive chord right here. Something that's also super important is a wireless keyboard. You don't want to be dealing with wires as a customer needs help, or whatever the case may be.
Some other things I want to talk to you about in the stations, we have tons of signage that helps the customers understand how to get into VR, and what they're doing. Maybe if you want to have little promotions, or whatever the case may be. On the TV screen, that's where we have spring boards. When the customers put on the headset, they're immediately in the springboard environment, and they can start choosing games, and get into content that way.
Something that we will touch on in a later video as far as the light beams, is what you'll notice here is the two light beams are in corners across from each other. You have one here, and then we have one over here. What most people, or what the natural way to think is to put them in catty corner, or opposite corners like this. Why that becomes a problem is 'cause we have stations all over in the rest of the store, and if we had a light beam up in this corner, it's going to actually emit light beam rays in these other stations and totally throw everything off. We'll get into more detail of that in a later video.
Also something that's important that we don't necessarily have here at this arcade, is we won't have a great way to store our headphones or our controllers. Something you will want to consider as you're setting these up, something that we probably should have done. Also, having ways to easily clean up the headset after a customer is done playing is super critical. You don't want a sweaty headset for your next guest. There's obviously things you can do like buy the waterproof covering for the Vive's, highly, highly suggest that.
Yeah, so I think that's it for our room scale station, I'll go ahead and take you over now to our group stations. What you can do, there's things where you can charge more for premium types of stations. These stations, they come with couches and chairs, if you come with a big group. Depending on how your arcade is actually laid out, and the options are up to you. Again, we have two Vive's in each one of these stations. I'm sorry, two Vive's total in this one big station. Something to note here, is that we actually only have two lighthouse beams that cover both Vive's. There was one in each corner. That actually does the trick. Again, we'll get into more detail in the lighthouse video.
What you do with your space, totally up to you. We thought it would be important to have these kind of more social spaces for customers. Again, you can charge premium price for those if you'd like. Lastly, I'm going to be showing you our standing room only stations. We have four stations in this back area. These surprisingly are actually all powered by two lighthouse beams, and that's it. They're up there, and up there. They cover all four of these headsets. We've got the wiring going through the walls, which is super important to us, that there's not just wires hanging out everywhere. These, really what we did here as far as space goes, is we just wanted to make sure if a customer in this standing room only stations, which you can set in your Steam VR settings, is if they swing, could they ... If these two customers swung at each other, could they actually hit each other?
Very, very unlikely for that to happen. This space is too much. It's about six and a half feet between, six and a half, seven feet between each play space. That's how we set that up. There's three options that you can do that we just showcased, but there's obviously way more, depending on how your store is laid out.
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