You’re in the middle of a city with seven of your closest friends, running, hiding, shooting and doing everything you can to avoid being eaten by the quickly approaching zombie horde.

But this isn’t a video game — at least not quite — and the virtual reality battle you’re frantically fighting is no couch-potato activity.

The cutting-edge experience will be available later this year at a pair of virtual reality arenas that are preparing to open in the Boston area. Participants donning virtual reality headsets will be free to roam around a 2,000-square-foot space while exploring new worlds, solving puzzles and, yes, hunting down bloodthirsty zombies.

“It’s kind of like you are walking in somebody else’s shoes, your body is the controller of the game,” said David O’Connor, one of the three men behind MindTrekVR, who said a player’s ability to immerse him or herself in an alternate reality is “what makes it awesome.”

MindTrekVR will open in Woburn this summer and in Marlboro later in the year. The group also plans to open locations in New Jersey and Philadelphia in 2018. Although the company wouldn’t say how much the virtual reality experience will cost, it did say it will be marketed as luxury entertainment for millennials.

The high-tech arena, which is basically an empty room outfitted with sensors on the ceiling to track players’ location, is powered by ZeroLatency, an Australian company. Players entering the arena will be wearing virtual reality headsets connected to laptops that are designed to fit in a backpack, O’Connor said.

O’Connor and his partners, David Rzepski and Brad Wurtz, come from a physical entertainment background and have owned trampoline parks, nightclubs and bowling alleys. They say it’s clear that virtual reality will be a huge part of entertainment in the future and stationary VR games are not the right way to go.

“Even though it might be a great experience, it’s nowhere near or even comparable to an open, free-roam environment where I can go with my friends,” Wurtz said. “You’re totally immersed, it’s very difficult to determine what’s real and what’s not.”

O’Connor agreed, saying: “The revolution is not going to happen in your living room.”

MindTrekVR also avoids the problem virtual reality experiences can have: motion sickness caused by the virtual world moving around a user while they’re sitting still.

One local company, VirZoom, sells an exercise bike that acts as a game controller to simulate the experience of physically moving.

Right now MindTrekVR has announced two games, the zombie apocalypse and another, less panic-inducing experience in which players have to walk around to solve a puzzle in an alien world where whales fly and down becomes up.