I had a chance to catch up with Wevr’s CEO and co-founder Neville Spiteri, which has been making location-based VR experiences for the last decade in what he calls a “New Cinema.” See more context in the rough transcript below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of special computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So when I was in Los Angeles for the Snap Lens Fest, I had a chance to drop by the Weaver headquarters at the Burbank Studios, where they had a chance to try out a number of their location-based entertainment experiences that they've been working on over the years. And so folks will remember Weaver was the creator of The Blue, The Encounter, which was a part of the set of demos that were shown at the GDC as well as Mobile World Congress, some of the very first public demos of the Vive. really looking at this intersection of immersive storytelling and these immersive technologies they converted the blue into more of a location-based entertainment experience that was shown at dreamscape they also worked on a number of other lbe experiences including a set of harry potter experiences that they worked with warner brothers to be shown in new york city had a chance to see that demo also had a chance to see their experience called terracotta warriors the secrets of the first emperor's maliseum that's a piece that they did in collaboration with vive arts that was being shown in china And also a little bit of a sneak preview of some of the different experiences that they have coming down the pike. And so I wanted to sit down with the co-founder and CEO, Neville Spiteri, to have a bit of a reflection and retrospective of Weaver's journey over the last 10 years. What he's been calling the new cinema, this location-based entertainment, free-roaming version of virtual reality that has been using a lot of Vive headsets and kind of more of the LBE manifestation of what's happening within the XR business. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Neville happened on Monday, October 13th, 2025 at the Weaver headquarters and the Burbank studios in Burbank, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:57.171] Neville Spiteri: Hi, I'm Neville Spiteri. I'm the co-founder and CEO at Weaver. We've been around for 10 plus years. We're early pioneers in virtual reality. We focus primarily on immersive experiences, entertainment experiences, and that's what we do.
[00:02:15.318] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space.
[00:02:21.710] Neville Spiteri: Yes, great question. So I'll start with what I called sort of the lightning rod moment, which was when I was invited up to Seattle to Valve Corporation, where back in 2014 had what was known as the room demo. And that's where I experienced presence, true presence for the first time. It was, you know, sub 12 millisecond latency, had all of the parameters that Michael Abrash at the time was talking about that It sort of defines what is particularly special about this medium, and it was a completely mind-blowing, eye-opening experience for me. And I decided then that this was the medium that I would like to dedicate my career towards going forward. Now, that said, leading up to that, how did I find myself at a game company like Valve? My whole previous 20 years prior to that has really been at the intersection of technology and storytelling, specifically did a tour of duty at Electronic Arts, where I was a senior producer working with multiple game teams there, and prior to that had also done a tour of duty in the film world, working in film production, kind of in the early days, in the early 90s, doing a lot of visual effects. My background kind of led me, in a sense, doing game development and kind of film work to really seeing the opportunity and the potential of this medium.
[00:03:47.081] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's interesting to think back to GDC 2015, when there was a series of different demos that Valve was showing, and one of those demos in that reel was The Blue, The Encounter. I think really blew, no pun intended, really blew a lot of people away in terms of just having the sense of scale. And it was a very brief encounter where you're underwater and on the ship and you're seeing this whale come up and look at you. And it was, I think, a very visceral turning point for a lot of people in terms of showing them the power of scale. room scale virtual reality being able to walk around but maybe take me back to that moment of after you got to see the room demo which was cutting edge with all the fiducial markers and tracking that valve had done to be able to get this kind of room scale vr set up and then at the gdc well actually it was at mobile world congress and then gdc but i think my encounter was at gdc where it was being introduced to the broader game development community for the first time so Maybe you could take me back to that moment of preparing for those first public demos for The Blue, The Encounter.
[00:04:50.808] Neville Spiteri: That was a very exciting time because we had the opportunity to have early access to the dev kit. It was called the Minus One Prototype Dev Kit. I think we were literally the first company, according to Chet Falchek, to have been shipped the dev kit. It was, I think, the day before Google got theirs. So that's one of our little tiny claims to fame. Point being, I feel incredibly fortunate to have had that opportunity and we wanted to make sure that we did it justice. So we worked very hard as a team to, in a very short time, produce a two minute taste of some of the characteristics of the medium that we felt really excited about. And, you know, I think the main thing which for us sort of came out of that was seeing that as a moment, as a wow moment, if you will, it really resonated with people. And I think, actually, I always joke about the fact, I think if we charged a dollar for every time we gave that demo... I think that would have been like the right business model for early days of VR. But joking apart, I mean, that piece, we eventually posted it on YouTube as a 360 video, and I think it's up to like 24 million views organically with no attention. So there is something quite powerful and magical about that, which I think cuts to what continues to inspire me personally and Weaver as a company to date going forward in terms of the potential of the medium.
[00:06:20.100] Kent Bye: Well, if we think back for the last decade, 10 years now since that demo in March of 2015, we're now in October of 2025. And so it's been a decade now. And there's been, I guess, a lot of highs and lows in the industry. There's been a lot of folks who have tried to go the distribution route of Steam or Oculus, you know, now meta, creating games, distributing games. But it seems like that Weaver's always been, you know, you have released some titles on Steam and Oculus, but... You've done a lot of location-based entertainment, which also had its rise and then the pandemic happened and then it waned a bit. Now it's sort of coming back a little bit, but I'd love to hear your perspective over the last decade where Weaver has really found its niche in order to continue to produce these types of immersive experiences, a number of which I just had a chance to demo.
[00:07:09.588] Neville Spiteri: Great. The last 10 years have been exciting and humbling. And we, early on from that room scale demo at Valve and from our exploration with the Whale Encounter with the Blue, one observation that we made as a founding team was that we kind of had this hunch that You know, it may be a while before people are going to get comfortable with the idea of a VR headset and buying one and using it, unless you are probably a hardcore gamer, you know, that was maybe inclined to be an early adopter of extreme technology, because it is extreme. I mean, you're covering your eyes with this device and it's still a foreign thing to people who try VR for the first time. So we had this hunch that VR may actually break out of home, not in the home, meaning in a location-based context. Kind of the analogy of, well, people went to the movie theaters to watch movies first before people bought televisions and now they have streaming devices. There's a progression that goes from doing something maybe a few times a year to once a month to eventually getting to the point where it's a daily use type of thing. and so we believed in location-based entertainment and we saw this firsthand because we'd go and demo the whale encounter we'd go and demo some of our early products and that was the format people did not go to steam to look for a vr game i mean they didn't vr wasn't even a thing right and the oculus store was it still in very early infancy And so the way you had an audience was to show up in places and set up demos. And that kind of really got us excited about location based VR well before COVID. That said, by and large, that particular iteration of VR died. And I don't think it died because of COVID. I think it was dead on arrival before COVID because, as always, the business model is not a sustainable one. Then it's very difficult for a particular format to survive for very long. And the unit economics were not positive, were not profitable. So it was very difficult to open a location and get 10 to 20 people per hour and expect to be able to be able to scale and build a big business that has changed fundamentally so fast forward you know five six years and we were there we were working with dreamscape we did a project with them we did a version of the blue with them we also collaborated very closely with the void so we had first-hand knowledge of the power the potential but also all the shortcomings that led to that particular format not working So today, and I'll share one anecdote. It was an eye opener for me when I went to Paris about three years ago and I went to see the Notre Dame experience there. And it was really wonderful to see lines of people of all ages, you know, grandparents with their grandkids. It was local French people, it was tourists who were visiting the cathedral but couldn't go in because of the fire, it was closed. And people were having a wonderful experience for 45 minutes. I mean, it was quite an eye-opener for me to see that. I mean, I can certainly understand if you're a hardcore gamer and have a VR headset that you're playing and you're in VR for potentially several hours at a time, right? But someone off the street who has never done VR and feeling like they have a positive experience for 45 minutes was an eye-opener. Moreover, is making money, right? So the team, Excurio, a lot of respect for that company. They really, I think, sort of pioneered a format where they got a few things right. You know, the fact that now it's an all-in-one headset on the Vive, which is robust and works really well in a location-based context. you had people who already either parked their car or already were at that train stop. And so they're looking for one other thing to do, very low friction to meet people where they're at. And then, you know, if you're going to bother to wait in line and put on a headset or put on this thing, you need to be in there for some amount of time to feel like you get your money's worth. And so this 40 minutes, I don't know if 40, 45 minutes is the magic number exactly, but I do believe that there is something to that for a whole variety of other consumer behavior dynamics. And the experience itself did not try to do too much. It's a virtual guided tour. And so for the last two, three years, we've been studying it and seeing that this new format is working and it's just in its infancy. So what we got really excited about is that, A, there is an opportunity now, given that the hardware kept advancing over the last decade, I mean, thanks to meta and Google and Apple and all these companies pouring literally billions of dollars every year, the devices kept getting better. It is remarkable how amazing these devices are. And in some respects, outside of some of the winning online applications, you know, the rec rooms, the VR chats, the gorilla tags, You know, the Beat Sabers, like there hasn't really been a killer app that has broken outside of a fairly small subset of gaming titles. So we're excited that this is it. And I'll pause here in a second. But I will say, like, as a whole company, we are now fully centered on what we call the new cinema. We believe that this represents the beginning of what will eventually lead to immersive blockbusters in the same way we're celebrating 50 years of Jaws this year. That was sort of the first iconic blockbuster movie. We think that this new cinema is going to be a thing and we're working on the next set of titles for it.
[00:12:58.638] Kent Bye: Nice. Yeah, I had a chance to see the eternal Notre Dame first at Venice, and then I went to go see it at the Notre Dame location. And yeah, there was a fire, which I think was blocking off access to see Notre Dame. But then there was this whole VR experience where you could basically travel through time. So you got a chance to see a guided tour that would be impossible online. To see because it shows the evolution of the architecture which I think is another amazing thing with what they did in that piece was to give you an experience that you couldn't have if you were just to look at the physical architecture but to actually Take you through time and yeah I think to have this group of people go on a guided tour people are used to that conceit and they're familiar with that genre and to just translate that over into VR and then to have anywhere from 100 to 150 people per hour and The economics starts to make a lot more sense in terms of being able to produce this content and push enough people through to make a profitable business, both by the content creators, but also the exhibitors showing it. So it does seem like a really exciting new area. So I wanted to talk a bit about your own evolution from because you said you did the blue. You had the first type of location based entertainment of doing demos at conferences, which a lot of people are seeing now. this content and it was a very brief demo and then you expanded it out with something that was released on to the store on steam and oculus but eventually you also did the dreamscape version so maybe you could talk about how you wanted to expand out the blue into a more in-depth location-based encounter and then love to hear after that we can start to dive into your trajectory of other projects that you worked on after that but maybe let's start with the blue where that seems to be where it all began
[00:14:36.408] Neville Spiteri: Sure, yes, thanks. So yes, The Blue continues to be sort of our flagship original title, and we are currently in development on a new version of The Blue, which will be presented as a location-based experience in this new format that we call the new cinema. In other words, it will be a a group experience where you can go for a dive with, you know, up to eight people at a time, your friends and your family. And it's a free roam format, fully immersed, walking around the space, and will take you through a 40 to 45 minute experience where you get to have multiple encounters with all kinds of wonderful ocean creatures and habitats. So it is very much an extension of the original version of The Blue, but adapted for this new format. So we're in production on that, and that will be an international release next year. And we continue to see how that is not a one-off. I think we now see an opportunity where this is the beginning of a series where you could easily have additional editions of the experience that are customized to maybe represent different geographic locations or highlight certain habitats and species. So we've got a lot of plans and we're executing and we're kind of trying to take the learnings from what we did 10 years ago and over the years, but also there's been so much great work that other teams have done and companies have put out there. So we're studying what's there. And we're trying to figure out how big of a leap we want to take. Are we going to take a quantum leap or do we want to take more of an incremental approach? And so this kind of ties to what else are we doing besides the blue? So we just launched in July of this year, we launched our first commercial title in a while. It is... an experience called the Terracotta Warriors, the secrets of the lost emperor's mausoleum. And if you're not familiar with the Terracotta Warriors, it's this incredible excavation in Xi'an, China, which is an excavation that's been going on for the last two or three decades. It's one of the national treasures of China and one of the most popular tourist spots. And we were commissioned through HTC, our partner, and Hongwen in China to build an experience that is deployed now at the mausoleum, at the museum in Xi'an. And we worked on that for well over a year from soup to nuts. We collaborated with the archaeologists and all of the experts to make sure we recreated an authentic mausoleum. representation of the mausoleum and Emperor Qin Shi Huang's incredible achievements with weaponry and library and various other artifacts and treasuries. And we decided for that one, we took an incremental step. We really liked what we saw with Notre Dame. There's also the Pyramids of Khufu experience from Excurio, which we really sort of also enjoyed and we felt was a good model for a guided tour kind of experience where you're literally being sort of taken on a tour through a historical site. And that's been fantastic. I mean, the capacity supports 150 people per hour. And they literally have busloads of tourists that are going through and going through the experience. And it worked. We have it both in English and the Mandarin version. And we're continuing to learn and watch that and kind of see what's working and what isn't. Now, between launching Terracotta Warriors and The Blue, we will be launching another title, which is unannounced. I can't quite disclose that just yet, but very soon will be another title where we're exploring story and narrative a little bit more. I think that's more than an incremental step. I think there's some aspects of that which we're really going to try to lean into the idea of can we engage you to follow a story and be lost in a story for lost as in because you're having such a good time not necessarily because you don't know what's going on or where you are in a fantasy world that is very kind of all quadrants it's very family friendly experience And I think that that will be hopefully of value to the whole industry because we think we've learned a lot from producing that. We think the audience will enjoy it and we'll all collectively learn from that. And then that should tee us up well for launching The Blue. Then there's a bunch of other things which I also quite can't talk about just yet, but we are really seeing now how we can go from where the industry is today in 2025 to what's going to be the first blockbuster. What is it going to take? What are all of the areas of the experience design, of the guest experience that need to be layered in in order for this to be a really massively popular, successful experience?
[00:19:41.820] Kent Bye: I also had a chance to see a demo of a Harry Potter experience. Maybe you could just give a bit more context for where that fits into the timeline and how that came about.
[00:19:49.161] Neville Spiteri: Yes. So a few years ago, this was right after COVID, we launched and during COVID we were producing a Harry Potter experience, which launched at the Warner Brothers Harry Potter flagship store in New York City. And so we were commissioned by Warner Brothers to make this amazing... There's actually two experiences. One was called Chaos at Hogwarts, where you get to, with your fellow students, explore Hogwarts and casting spells and having fun and adventuring and Dobbies guiding you around. And you get to face a dragon at the end. It's really quite fun. And we did a second experience, which was called Brooms Over London, where you got to fly on a broom in VR again with your friends and you're chasing Death Eaters, flying over the Thames and super fun ride. And both of these experiences were deployed in the flagship store. And I say were because it was a very limited footprint. They were hugely popular. There are lots of people, lots of lines. It worked really well as an attraction. And the idea was to eventually scale this to multiple locations. And so we've been working with Warner Brothers for some time, and we're now starting to look at what the next sort of projects are going to be there. But the demo you saw was actually a variation of that.
[00:21:11.863] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. And so what I really enjoy around this kind of genre of the guided tours and the new cinema, if you want to call it that, where you have an opportunity to see a really vast space or a space that goes either into like the surreal and fantastical, like the Harry Potter with Hogwarts and all these places that you kind of get a taste of where you have this combination of you're mostly walking through, but sometimes you have like virtual locomotion, which is kind of interesting to see how, you know, sometimes if I'm moving sideways or there's strafing that can be a little bit motion sickness inducing for me. So I always have to try to make sure that whatever direction I'm moving, I have to be facing that direction. Otherwise I can get a little bit of motion sickness. And so I'm negotiating that, but also just, you know, when I look at something like Horizon of Kofu, it ends up being this guided tour of the pyramids that you wouldn't be able to do because you can't fly through the pyramids. You can't become as tall as a giant. And so starting to really use the affordances of VR to do these fantastical things that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise. And so the key thing that I saw through each of the different experiences was the way that you're taking a tour through the world. There's a lot of world building aspects to it, I think, that are a key part of making sure that the worlds are interesting to look at. And then you're walking through these interesting spaces. And then on top of that, you can have the characters that are then the centerpiece. But at the heart of it, I think still, for me at least, when I see these types of experiences, is that I want to see something vast and amazing. I'm reminded of something like the Impressionist experience by Excurio where it ends up being like you're looking at these paintings and these objects and it ends up being a lot of focus of the social dynamics and it was very character driven story which I noticed that when I did that it wasn't as interesting for me to see those characters as it was to kind of walk through these open fast open spaces like some of the other pieces like Horizon Okofu that ended up being more a focus on the environmental context or the spatial context rather than the character-driven stories. So I feel like that's a bit of the challenge of trying to have the heart of making sure that the worlds are interesting. And then if that's the case, then you can start to lean upon that to be able to add either more interactive parts or more story parts.
[00:23:27.839] Neville Spiteri: Yeah, that's super interesting. And I share that observation that you made. And it's probably very early to say that world building is sort of the higher order bit versus a character-driven interaction. There may be, as this evolves, someone will crack a character-driven based experience. But I tend to right now, I would say, based kind of on the state of the art right now, that we found that the sense of presence that you have of being in a space and moving through the space becomes probably the thing that propels you forward. And so the spatial design and your experience through it and how you move through it becomes probably the primary thrust more so than characters and the narrative itself. In fact, we often find that when a character is talking to you it very quickly becomes they're talking at you and you kind of tune it out and we see the need for it so we're aware of of situations and the experiences we're designing where you have a certain amount of exposition that you need for the guest to sort of know what to do especially if part of the goal here is to provide information and educate but it does tend to somehow take you out of the experience. So we're finding that actually another key element of the design besides the world building aspect is your interaction, not with characters, but with the people you are with. So we have a very lightweight avatar representation, but it is incredibly engaging from all of our data, and we playtest every single week, and we can see how, you know, sometimes we have tests where we hire testers from various colleges and universities, they show up, they don't know each other. And in the experience, during the experience, they're laughing, they're high-fiving, and by the time they take off the headset at the end, they're exchanging contact information. There's something very powerful about the social aspect that we want to lean into, where there's an affordance for interaction with the group that you're with. and i think there's a lot to explore there for us but one last thing i will say about the characters and the extent to which we would still love to have an experience where you truly build an emotional bond with a virtual character in the experience this as you may recall is another theme that weaver has been tackling for many many years going back to when we worked with john favreau on gnomes and goblins where we really explored this idea of, can you feel like you're forming an emotional bond with a virtual character? And because you're fully immersed, much more so than a TV show or a movie or even a video game, you're there with that character, and they're there with you, and you really sort of build it up. We think that there's a lot of potential in that direction, and we're starting to explore that a little bit. It's not an easy thing to crack. There's a lot of nuance and a lot of learnings from other different art forms, but that's something which we'll be pushing on.
[00:26:37.355] Kent Bye: Yeah, I find that what comes to mind is Kevin Mac has experience with different AI entities that he's created in his experiences over the years where you really feel like you're interacting with something that is dynamically engaging with your movements and your embodiment in a way that wasn't anything spoken, but it just felt like you were encountering an intelligence there. Obviously, it was just kind of reacting to my movements, but... not demonstrating any sort of higher level intelligence but at least a spatial awareness but having ways that you're able to kind of build connections with the characters i feel like there's something around interacting and having it respond to you and you know also having a group experience that you can start to have the dynamics where you don't necessarily have to have everybody see the exact same thing that you could start to have things that are very specific to each of the individuals so you can start to maybe play with that one-on-one encounter a little bit Because there are different ways that you're experimenting with interactivity. And I wouldn't say narrative agency because there's nothing that you're doing that's changing the story, but at least giving you a sense of a deeper spatial environmental presence that you're able to interact with the environment around you. in a way that you have these little interactive parts. But then, you know, then there's a whole other narrative agencies, you know, something like Westworld, where you're able to really dictate where things are going to go. That's like a whole another level that I think is going to get into AI and other other things that like what's the narrative structure that you're going to facilitate something like that. But at least now you have the ability for people to have a shared narrative experience and then have these little interactive components. But I could see how as things continue to develop that people will want to have more and more of this engagement and maybe even like have these one-on-one encounters that every person in the experience will be able to have, but it may not be everybody sees the same thing.
[00:28:25.859] Neville Spiteri: Absolutely. And what you're describing is, you know, one of the reasons why we're so excited about this new cinema is because I think probably for the first time we feel like there is a format that will allow us to explore these things. And we know that audiences, there's clearly strong demand. The demand side is high for this kind of thing. But there hasn't really been the right format to deliver this in. And, you know, if you're trying to create an experience for an online social game, the metrics you have to optimize for to chart up in the store and the kind of social interaction you can provide with your friends that are online playing indifferent, it's quite different. It's fundamentally quite different from you are there physically with your friends and your family together in the space together. And you're not optimizing for retention and replay. No, you're optimizing to deliver a really quality 45 minutes, largely linear experience that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And there is now an avenue for that. So yes, I think we're super inspired by the opportunities to explore all that.
[00:29:37.941] Kent Bye: Can you talk a bit about your philosophy of trying to add different levels of interactivity and engagement throughout this experience? What guides you as you add these different parts? Because the risk is at some point you are interacting with something so much that it becomes so much like a toy or something that's fun to play with that you end up missing bits of the narrative. And if there's other people that are doing things that could be distracting. So it feels like it's a bit of a tension between the story that you're telling, but also allowing people to engage with the world in a way that makes them feel even more deeply present with the world.
[00:30:10.936] Neville Spiteri: That's such a great question and I don't have like a cheat sheet of like sort of here are the top five heuristics that are that clean cut and straightforward and part of the reason for that is that it is really quite context sensitive or story dependent and what I mean by that is if you're talking about an underwater context for example where there's a certain tempo to how things unfold because i don't know if you're a scuba diver but like things feel slower underwater right it's a thicker medium that you're moving through and so that alone right there it really doesn't feel natural to throw in a bunch of like fast moving interactions for example right and so in the almost irrespective of the story or that particular story beat or moment or plot that you're trying to get through you have these other aspects of experience design that really inform the extent to which you can layer in more of an interactive mechanic or not so in this other project that we're working on which we're launching end of this year early next year it's basically it's a storybook it's a children's storybook and it's It's very playful. There's this one moment which I will share where you get to pop bubbles, right? And it's incredibly fun and it's very obvious and it's clearly not in any way interfering with, you're still engaged in whatever exposition is happening at the time. There's not cognitive dissonance that's like pulling you away. Well, I can't listen to you while I'm popping bubbles. It's so easy to pop bubbles and it's really fun and you can see your friends doing it and you're doing it together. So the context really, I think, provides a lot of clarity for the degree to which you do that. I mean, in general, if I were to say sort of one overarching design principle that I often think about and we often think about on the team is it's like, don't throw interaction for the sake of interaction. Like, you really have to fight hard to earn the right to have that space, especially when you have to consider different degrees of difficulty and accessibility and familiarity with the medium. So a lot of interactions which gamers obviously know, and there's just this lore of knowledge that has been accumulated. But we're talking about catering to an audience here that maybe literally, that never maybe never played a video game. And so everything has to be super intuitive. The affordance has to be so clearly emerging from the world and from the environment and all of those things.
[00:32:43.646] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'd love to hear you also elaborate on this design challenge of when you have this new cinema format where you have to move 150 people through a physical space. So there's a pathing that has to happen where they're moving at a certain cadence where they're, let's say, chapters that they're moving through that everybody's similar chapter length where they're able to continue to move. lots of people through this space, but at the same time, in the Terracotta experience, you have people virtually moving through a much vaster space. So you have to have people not only moving, but also have virtual locomotion in order to cover the vastness of the story that you're telling in that. And so I've found that sometimes I prefer to always walk as much as I'm going to be moving. If I'm going to be in an experience like this, I want to like walk through it. But there's also like you're walking through spaces that you wouldn't be able to walk through as much. Because the trade-off there is that there's some people that can get sensitive to motion sickness as they're kind of having that virtual locomotion. If people, especially if they're new, they can start to get a little bit of motion sickness, especially if they're moving sideways or whatnot. So I'm just curious to hear how you start to find that balance between having the vastness of the experience, but also trying to mitigate the different motion sickness triggers.
[00:33:55.706] Neville Spiteri: Yeah. So I think if you had no constraints, the preference is that all movement is self-directed. And you do really want to minimize virtual locomotion because of the nausea and the potential for that. And so I think as a general rule, we start there. Now, to your point, though, and in the case with the Terracotta Warriors, Everything is built to scale. We followed, in Unreal, we made sure, because of our relationship with the archaeologists, we were required, it was a requirement to build everything to scale. So you, when you're standing in a space, you get the actual physical sense when you look up and you see the vastness and the size of the doors. So if you now have to traverse through real contiguous space that is a kilometer plus, and you're trying to do that in a 30-minute experience, well, you have to move people through on a virtual platform. And I think Excurio does that well in Khufu, where you're on a platform and you kind of get to fly. So there are some nice affordances that you can get when you use virtual locomotion mechanics. And so I think that there needs to be a clear motivation, like I'm going to give you a bird's eye view, which you simply wouldn't be able to have. So you bear with the fact that you might have some nausea. But guess what? If you're on a floating platform, you probably would experience that in real life, too. we try to be really careful and you can never be disciplined enough to not break the basic rules of acceleration and speed and maximum velocity and how you start and stop and how we rotate the platform and there's things in Khufu constraints we had to do where we had to rotate you around in order to set you up because you're now in a physical space we need you to make a right turn because you're going to hit a wall and so a lot of what you see in terms of the virtual locomotion is not a creative artistic choice it's because we have a technical requirement to guide people through as you said from chapter to chapter or zone to zone as we call them But you're in a physical space and at some point there are walls and you have chaperones and boundaries and so you also have to factor that into play. But a lot of the design challenge with these location-based experiences is that you're fitting in specific physical spaces that have certain dimensions. Some places may have pillars at certain points that you need to call out to the player. You might have to have your art design around them. and these all kind of factor in. Now we spent a lot of time and invested a lot of energy into really working out software systems that almost like a show control system, right? Where you're providing information about the group, we know where you are, we know where you are relative to other people, we know when someone from another group has maybe gone rogue and have walked into your space, you can see them for safety reasons. we prioritize safety always safety first comfort second and then kind of everything else goes below that
[00:36:57.501] Kent Bye: And this seems like a really interesting collaboration that you have with HTC and Vive Arts because it seems like that Cheryl Wang, the founder and CEO of HTC, is very much a patron of the arts and having Samantha King come in and work with all these cultural institutions. And they've been doing a lot of really amazing collaborations around the world with all these different types of location-based entertainment organizations. pieces at museums. It seems like museums are a perfect location to really seed a lot of these LBEs because there's already people that are coming to these places for tourism reasons, and there's just like an extra bonus for people to see something that they wouldn't be able to see without being in a virtual reality experience. And so it seems like there's been a really great marriage between LBE and these different types of existing cultural institutions. But I'd love to hear a little bit more around your collaboration with Five Arts and getting into more of the cultural institutions and then potentially also moving from there and expanding out into more of the mainstream.
[00:37:56.297] Neville Spiteri: Yeah, absolutely. I call it the new museum. You know, we're talking about the new cinema, but there is this new museum experience clearly. And as exactly as you're saying, a lot of these virtual guided experiences are really a perfect fit for different cultural museum and art institutions around the world. It's very much a global opportunity. You know, you mentioned Sher Wang. I really think she is an unsung hero in the VR world. I mean, she's really been, you know, obviously Mark Zuckerberg has been a major advocate and supporter and funder of the industry. But I mean, Sher Wang is from the very beginning has been right up there in terms of her dedication to the industry and the medium and specifically the arts, as you said. And it is actually quite wonderful to see that what started out as, maybe more obscure art one-off type installations are now evolving into kind of repeat consumer museum experiences. I think that is clearly happening now and I think will continue to happen and expand and I think that's a growing market. And I think Vive Arts is, you know, has been working also with Celina Yeh, who's heads up Vive Arts. They were a great partner on the Terracotta Warriors project. And I think there's going to be a lot more great work that comes out of the Vive Arts group. For us, we will continue to do more museum-oriented experiences. In fact, The Blue lends itself to that space as well. You know, science centers, museums, and there's no doubt that we will find a home in many of those locations and venues. I think also then beyond that, we're now trying to explore what may be more of a mainstream mass popular subject matter and format that is not at a museum, but is maybe deployed literally in new cinemas, in either refurbished old cinemas, malls, public spaces. And there are several companies like Eclipso and Fi and Fever that are basically, literally, they're leasing or owning and operating large new locations and venues that are purpose-built and designed to accommodate these VR experiences. And I think those have an opportunity to be homes for all kinds of really fun, pure sort of mainstream popular experiences.
[00:40:22.108] Kent Bye: One of the things we haven't mentioned at all is the Apple Vision Pro. I'm just curious if the Apple Vision Pro, when it comes to the larger ecosystem of XR, if that's been in your radar, if you've been working on any Apple Vision Pro projects. I think a lot of their focus has been on 180 video with the Apple immersive video. So really leaning into the high resolution immersive video, but it seems like a lot of stuff that you've been working on is both more CGI based, but also LBE. But I'm just curious, where Apple Vision Pro fits into the ecosystem of potential platforms to explore.
[00:40:54.924] Neville Spiteri: Well, the Apple Vision Pro is the most amazing piece of hardware on planet Earth, if you ask me. It's just such an incredible device. I mean, I love that thing. It's just incredible. That said, you know, it's an early prototype product, right? It's not a mainstream commercial product. I think that's very clear. So from a business perspective at Weaver, exactly as you said, we are really primarily right now targeting location-based experiences, this new cinema. And the Apple Vision Pro, for a variety of reasons, is not the first choice in addition to cost for that. But there's no doubt, I think, that over time that will factor in more. we actually as a company started out in the early days doing a lot of 360 immersive video and we actually really really like that format i always did i know there were a lot of people who said well it's not really vr if it's not 3d and you can walk around and i definitely subscribe to that sort of distinction in terms of the experience but we think that the 360 video immersive video is a very compelling format and we will probably do a bunch more stuff on that going forward as that format, which is very different from the new cinema. It's kind of the new cinema in your home in a way. So I think that would be fun to explore.
[00:42:15.503] Kent Bye: Well, because the blue is something that you keep coming back to over the last decade plus of being in the XR space and exploring new cinema. Just curious to hear some of your lessons learned from translating it from the original iteration into the released version, but then also creating more of an LBE version for Dreamscape. And what were some of the big lessons that you got out of being able to show it within the context of Dreamscape that you're trying to feed into this next iteration?
[00:42:44.679] Neville Spiteri: yes so going from a single player or a single person solo experience which was our first version of the blue to the first group experience in the blue which we did with dreamscape a few years back that was an eye-opener it's why i like this lbe group experience format so much because I mean, when you're scuba diving, by definition, you don't go scuba diving alone. Technically, you're not supposed to, right? You have to have a buddy with you and ideally a certified master if you're going as a group to lead you. And so the idea of being able to sort of tap your buddy on the shoulder and point look at that fish kind of thing right and there's something inherently more fun and engaging when you're underwater with a group and your friends that's true of many things it turns out but it's certainly true when you're underwater so that we're carrying forward we're leaning much more into group interactions and that's something that you'll see more of in the next version of the blue You know, the Blue Deep Rescue we did with Dreamscape was a 10-minute experience. We're now developing a 40-minute experience, and so 40, 45-ish. So the requirements and the demands on a through-line, on a narrative structure that keeps you going through and pulls you through the experience... beyond just a string of wow moments is something that we're factoring in and exploring and I mean the ocean provides such a rich and deep no pun intended you know sort of inventory of things to work with so those are a couple of the main things but we will continue to keep some of our pillars you know in terms of kind of a visceral sort of beauty, a certain fidelity that makes you feel like you're there. We'll also be sure to capture some of the magic we had where, you know, people really felt, some people like literally were in tears or felt more relaxed. The blue is even used for, in some universities, for chronic pain reduction because of the fact that it has a calming effect on you. And so there are some elements of the blue which we didn't necessarily design for, that there were just results that we want to carry forward intentionally now in our next design, in our next experience.
[00:45:04.298] Kent Bye: Yes, I think around the formats of the new cinema, it tends to be very much a linear path that people are going through, or at least they're guided to go through this experience. And when I think of something like Gnomes and Goblins, I think of this open world exploration where you're able to go wherever you want, but also have this vast, rich, world and world building. Love to hear any comments or reflections on some deep lessons that you're taking away from working on Gnomes and Goblins in this collaboration with Jon Favreau of building out this entire world to be explored in more of an open-ended world exploration.
[00:45:39.758] Neville Spiteri: Yes, definitely. So Gnomes and Goblins was a learning experience on so many dimensions. It was a highly ambitious project and we were targeting a PC based experience and also at a time when all of the focus shifted to the quest. So a lot of the learnings for me and for the company personally around Gnomes and Goblins are really around how you get the right shaped product and what shelf is it on and is it a fit? And so when we think about the new cinema now and we think about this new 45 minute format where there is an opportunity to, you're not trying to compete with other Steam titles where there's an expectation for it to be a game you can play for hours and hours and hours, right? You know, I think that there's some of the ambitions that we had that John and Weaver shared around what the medium could be that I think are very applicable to this new cinema format. And so the core element of this open world design, which continues to work well and can continue even in the blue right now, where you have a lot of opportunity to move around and explore, which is really cool. And there isn't any sort of fixed design format for these location based experiences. A lot of them tend to be you're going through from chapter to chapter in a particular order because you're trying to optimize guest flow in a specific way. But there are also examples of experiences where you literally can roam around freely and go wherever you want, right? So that lends itself quite well to things like being able to move around a large forest and pick and choose which path you take and those kinds of things. So there's that. But I think that the central theme of which I mentioned earlier, of what we were trying to do, and to a large extent, I think people really felt like we got there with Buddy Little Goblin, is that you can feel a sense of connection with this artificial virtual creature, this AI, if you will. Although the word AI now is obviously connotes a completely different much bigger set of topics. But yes, I think that we're going to carry forward and we're going to continue to explore this idea of an AI that you can encounter and explore and communicate with and all of that.
[00:48:06.555] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality and new cinema and this new emerging forms of immersive storytelling might be and what all that might be able to enable?
[00:48:20.220] Neville Spiteri: so i our vision you know and my personal vision i really do see how the new cinema and vr and what full immersion in this modality where you're physically there with other people I think there's a potential to really not only inspire, but like elevate, elevate people, like really give people a sense of connection and really move people in a way that's transformational. Always felt that about the medium and feel it more strongly than ever. And without sounding too cheesy or whatever, but it does feel like generally in the world today, with so much scrolling and so much of a race to the bottom where there's just yet another AI generated clip that you can watch. There's enough of that and there's going to be a lot more of that. But with VR and new cinema, it's a very different thing. It's almost like sometimes we use the term initiatory media or transformational media, where you come out of the experience transformed, initiated, like you're in a better place in yourself. And I think that that is the real potential of this medium, that it really becomes a format that hopefully will be a really good force for humanity.
[00:49:36.380] Kent Bye: Have you had any transformational experiences in VR?
[00:49:40.443] Neville Spiteri: So, yes, I definitely had. I think that, you know, the first, like I said, the presence experience was absolutely transformational. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, like when I'm playing Walkabout Golf, and I'm having a conversation with a friend, there is a form of transformation that happens there because it's an affordance, which is harder, difficult to replicate. Even when you're on a real golf course, I'm not a golfer, but that's the other thing. It's just like, so yes, that would be the example I would pick.
[00:50:14.883] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left and said they'd like to say to the broader immersive community? Any, any final thoughts?
[00:50:21.030] Neville Spiteri: I mean, you know, it's there's so much of a sort of a this blanket feeling that it's hard and it's a struggle and it's been a challenging medium and it certainly is. But I think that it is just an incredibly powerful medium and it's just really in the early days of what's going to be possible. So I don't think there's a more exciting time to be involved in immersive XR VR creation than ever.
[00:50:46.756] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Neville, thanks again for joining me here on the podcast. And, you know, there's been a lot of companies that have come and gone in VR. And I think the fact that Weaver has been able to stick around for the last decade and finding these little pathways of immersive storytelling, location-based entertainment, and It feels like you've been able to find a niche that you're really pushing forward the medium in terms of what's possible with these new forms of the new cinema, with interactivity, these social dynamics, but also telling these compelling stories. And it was a real pleasure to get a chance to get a bit of a sneak peek of some of the stuff that's coming down the pike and also seeing some of the backlog of other LBE experiences that I haven't had a chance to get a chance to see. you know, as I go around and travel in the industry, going to festivals like Venice Immersive and other places that are really also showcasing a lot of these types of experiences. So I really feel like it's a small part of the industry that not everybody's had a chance to directly experience yet. But I highly recommend folks whenever you can to go check out Phi, Eclipso, and Fever, all these different places that are showing these different types of experiences. Because I do think that it is a niche that is both sustainable and profitable and place to really grow the medium as it were to kind of meet audiences where they're at and to be transported into these different realms and to use the affordances of vr to tell stories in new and compelling ways and i think that at weaver you're certainly at the forefront of doing that so it's a real pleasure to have a chance to drop by your offices here and check out some of your latest stuff and to you know have a chance to talk about it with you here today so thanks again for joining me here on the podcast to help break it all down thank you so much kent always a pleasure Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
