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.