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Viveport Arcade: Operator FAQs


Rockjaw

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Well,I have emailed Valve as well. Also,their system does not work anyway. Comnercial license cannot be purchased if You already gave a game in library (pretty sure You guys have most of interesting titles already)and even new one gets stuck at payment. £45 for tilt brush,I almost pissed myself. To equip all 6 station we have would be £6k ,and thats not counting raw data and spt on they own deals.

 

Just seconding all the things You guys said about how it works - customers do not spend their rntire session playing one title - they want to give them all a go which is great for developers anyway. We are at forefront of showing best VR there is to public and this pricing is trully killing us.After rent rates etc I am left with nothing(i dont get paid),and thats 6 months into businness with glowing reviews on trip advisor and facebook. 6 more months and I am gonna pack up. Ctr vr - you should get rates discounted to 0 by your council - email them.

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Well,I have emailed Valve as well. Also,their system does not work anyway. Comnercial license cannot be purchased if You already gave a game in library (pretty sure You guys have most of interesting titles already)and even new one gets stuck at payment. £45 for tilt brush,I almost pissed myself. To equip all 6 station we have would be £6k ,and thats not counting raw data and spt on they own deals.

 

Just seconding all the things You guys said about how it works - customers do not spend their rntire session playing one title - they want to give them all a go which is great for developers anyway. We are at forefront of showing best VR there is to public and this pricing is trully killing us.After rent rates etc I am left with nothing(i dont get paid),and thats 6 months into businness with glowing reviews on trip advisor and facebook. 6 more months and I am gonna pack up. Ctr vr - you should get rates discounted to 0 by your council - email them.

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(Deleted your double-post btw, .)

 

Where are you based? Feel free to promote here, I think it's quite possible we'll have non-owners here who might be interested in visiting.

 

Not trying to tell you (or anyone else) how to run things, but with current Steam pricing, does it make any more sense to have dedicated stations so you don't pay for multiple licenses? I agree that people probably want to try a variety of things, but at the same time, it would seem to reduce cost. So they have multiple 'experiences' that are available, but each one's dedicated to one thing. In theory you could even theme the areas, etc?

 

Thanks for hopping in, . Happy to talk more if you have a spare minute!

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Hi Stephen, 

 

am looking at setting up a VR demo event with commercial aims in the next couple of weeks. Do I have to approach individual developers to licence their games for general public to try out? 

 

Without any kind of arcade/management software how do I pay licence fees, use a stopwatch when someone plays Raw Data for five minutes? 

 

or just do it anyway, given that I have hit a brick wall with almost every attempt I make to try and do this all the 'proper' way. Any help is very much appreciated

 

regards

 

Lewis Cook

Escape VR Ltd

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Hey Lewis /  - right now as you realize I'm sure, we don't have a Viveport program ready to give you access to.

 

The best way to do this and stay legitimate, right now, would be to use Steam's licencing program. That, as I understand it, charges you on a per seat basis for licences (on a per month pay schedule).

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Hi!

I just read this very interesting thread, you guys are discussing the things that really matter to Vive arcade owners atm! We started Turnaround VR in Sweden on Oct 1st. We have 9 stations with Vive consumer edition. Actually, this weekend we are down to stations since only 7 of our 11 Vives are still functioning! Some of them started "blinking" occassionally, and later just died. On one we have "green confetti", i.e. the game shows but there are hundreds of green dots here and there. Another Vive presumably got water damaged by an extremely sweaty customer, it's dead.

 

So the (very) urgent questions for us are:
* How fast can HTC get some Vive BE to Sweden?
* What is the fastest way to order?
* Does the warranty cover use by customers? Somebody claimed it does not!
* Can our current Vive CE be upgraded to BE support-wise?

 

We need at least two more Vives friday 16th, because with 2 closed stations on saturday (our most popular day of the week) we will lose money big time. Well, let's say we'll lose money BIGGER time, since we already lose money big time. So, if we can't get the Vives very soon, we will have to buy a couple more Vive CE in a store.

 

About using a single pair of base stations for 2 play areas: Well, maybe. Technically, there is no problem, you could have a single pair for 100 Vives if you wanted to. But both occlusion and distance is a problem. Even with the base stations 3m high, I think you'll get enough occlusion to ruin the experience. Regarding distance, we did some testing this summer. When the distance between the two base stations is increased beyond 7 meters, we often lost tracking, even when using a sync cable.

 

We have built 9 booths, each 3*4 meters, separated by a 12 mm wooden board wall. Very much like the pictures in this thread. Like CTRL V we make sure no IR leaks out of the booth by moving one of the base stations to the middle of the separation wall and angling it slightly inwards, into the booth. Tracking will suffer, but not significantly. The whole room is about 12*15 meters.

 

Our hope to get a positive cash flow is more stations. We just bought a racing setup, that we plan to use with a Vive as well. If all looks good, and people don't get too sick while racing, we'll buy 3 more racing setups. In this case, we think it'll be OK to use a single base station pair for all for racing machines, because people are crammed in a room 4.5x2 meters, and also sitting down.

Finally, I agree that the new Steam commercial license costs are absurd. If we're to have any chance of surviving, they will have to reconsider. Viveport may be a solution, haven't had time to read much about it, but I will.

 

Magnus Kindblom, owner of Turnaround VR

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  • 3 weeks later...

Long time no post from me but thought I'd share my experiences. The reason its been a long time is finally got my shop lease sorted so been burning the candle both ends and in the middle. Going to be called thevrhub.co.uk. Short video clip on there from our testing before we signed the lease ;)

 

Doing things a bit different to most from what I've seen. Lets just say the shop fitting is taking a long time as its being designed as we go along ;)

 

As to multiple vives... they dont like each other. We ran an event in the communal space outside our store... its a bit like a mall and was the xmas party for all the tenants. We had 2 side by side and had to place screens in between or the tracking just went haywire. As to 2 or more HMD in 1 space sharing 1 set of lighthouses... yes that does work. In fact we plan on running 4 in our main studio room but have only tested with 3 so far there was too much junk in the way to get a4th up and running. What we have found is even though nothing moves as they are screwed to the wall you are best calibrating the room everyday. Otherwise you end up with game VR floor getting higher than the real floor... and you lose the controllers if you put them down. Maybe down to the fact our lighthouses are 3m high and just over 5m apart. The scary part... our PCs are in a different room running through a media streamer then back to an in room display via ethernet. We did tests with 10m hdmi and usb cables on a single rig, but havent wired up the final setup of all the rigs yet. Risky! But when we finish I'll post pics and youll see why we are taking this approach ;)

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A four player setup works just fine. We've got 5x4 meter Holosuites with up to four players each. The cables are still somewhat restricting in what we can achieve in terms of game design, but we've developed a number of games specifically for that setup and the vast majority of our customers are playing our exclusive multiplayer games. If the Lighthouses are placed high enough at a reasonable angle, occlusion is not much of an issue.

Still, I'd be happy if we could encompass a Holosuite with four Lighthouses at some point, as there are some situations where occlusion becomes tricky with multiplayer setups. Imagine all four of them are crowded together in the center of the area, then things get tricky.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi all

We opened first nordic VR arcade today in Finland second biggest mall. We have 14 tooms to play and they are 3x3 meters..

We did have press release today. We planned very much how lighthouses are situated. Be very carefull planning your space and wall materials. Lighthouses are disturbing very much each others if this is not carefully tiane care. Do not leave open space between vr roooms. And remember do not use only two or one lighthouse with two rooms because if there is people watching friends play in middle of two rooms it could disturb lightouses. So you have two options. Install 4 walls your rooms or install them opposite each others so rooms an their lighthouses cannot see anyway each others..

We have 350m2 space and 14 rooms. I think this lighthouse problem should be solved by vive if we want to see arcades more in near future. We are now live and we share information in our web site http://pikseli.fi sorry it is only in finnish now but we translate later.. We hired top of line designers to create special envirnment to enjoy vr content checkout instagram #pikseliarcade

Jan Hursti Pikseli Arcade

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