Here’s my interview with the co-founders of at Two Bit Circus, Brent Bushnell & Eric Gradman, that was conducted on Thursday, October 11, 2018 at site visit to Two Bit Circus in Los Angeles, CA just over a month from their grand opening September 5th, 2018. See more context in the rough transcript below.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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 continue my series of looking at AWE past and present. Today's interview is an archival interview that I did with the co-founders of 2-Bit Circus, which is a micro amusement park based in Los Angeles. So Brent Bushnell and Eric Gradman, they were the co-founders and I happened to be in town for Magic Leap LeapCon back in October of 2018. And they had just recently opened, I think in like August, they opened for a few months. And so I made a site visit and checked out all what was happening there and played a number of different games and had a chance to sit down with them to talk around their vision for where they wanted to take their location-based entertainment journey. Of course, in 2020, then the pandemic hit. And so then they sort of like reshuffled things. The two-bit circus still exists. And now Brent is also doing this other thing in collaboration with Aiden Wolfe called Dream Park, which is more of like a downloadable theme park. So he's been going from this more micro amusement park, very much located into a physical location. And- bringing people together and some of the different design intentions that they were having around that really focusing around like the social dimension of having this context for people to have these light interactions. But at the end of the day, trying to facilitate social lubricant to allow people these opportunities to connect to new people or connect to their existing friends and family in new and different ways. And so lots of different community types of experiences that were being prototyped and developed there at Two Bit Circus. And then now in this new phase with Dream Park, we'll kind of dive into how they've been taking a lot of those different lessons and started to use augmented reality as this infinite canvas to do all sorts of other types of experimentations in these large open public spaces. But that's Dream Park. We'll be diving into that in the next episode. But in this conversation, you get a little bit more of like the early foundings of 2-Bit Circus as an entity with the co-founders of Brent Bushnell and Eric Gradman. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Brent and Eric happened on Thursday, October 11th, 2018, during a site visit to Tubert Circus in Los Angeles, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:23.683] Brent Bushnell: My name is Brent Bushnell, co-founder, CEO of Two Bit Circus. My background is engineering, but I'm obsessed with immersive entertainment and have been trying all of it as long as I possibly can. And then met Eric and we actually made what are now called escape rooms. We did early 2009, 2010. We just wanted a live action adventure. We were really inspired by Michael Douglas and the game and the idea that you could be an active participant in a narrative that was everywhere. And we've just kept playing ever since.
[00:02:49.724] Eric Gradman: My name's Eric Gradman. I'm the mad inventor. That's actually on my business cards here at 2-Bit Circus. And I am also obsessed with immersive theater and all things immersive. And my job is just to create crazy experiences for people. My background's in robotics, and I apply more than you might expect of robotics to the process of showing people a good time.
[00:03:09.648] Kent Bye: interesting well i know i've had a chance to see the ledge which was taking studio transcendence like going up uh basically a window washer and you have this sort of haptic platform and i was watching it from a distance being like okay that's not going to be a problem like whatever i've done vr and then i got up there and i found myself like whatever you had created with the haptic experience was like triggering something in my unconscious that was like making me not want to step off the ledge and so i was just like wow this is really interesting. How are you taking these types of mechanical systems and then adding it to immersive technology and then creating these experiences? So it sounds like you've been doing this for a number of years and then now you've opened up this whole carnival slash immersive entertainment interactive night on the town here. And so maybe you could talk about that evolution since you started with the escape rooms and then how the immersive technology revolution has come and then how you're kind of leveraging that.
[00:04:04.053] Eric Gradman: Let me start on that real quick. One thing that I think characterizes a lot of the projects that Brent and I have done together over the past now 10 years is that we are always smashing together things that you might not expect. Haptics and pixels, sound and story, like taking different types of technology and mixing them together to create new experiences that you can't get VR is great. You put a bunch of pixels in front of someone's face and they have a good time. They're in another world. But when you start adding haptics, when you start adding scent, when you start adding story, all of a sudden you can create experiences that are exponentially greater than any one of those things alone.
[00:04:39.205] Brent Bushnell: I'd also say that that ledge particularly checks a real fundamental box for us for VR in public, which is it's a great experience for the person going through it. It's also really wonderful for the onlookers. One person freaking out in VR is really entertaining to 30 other people watching them do that. And we've done a lot from that early escape room we built. I've helped brands do a lot of exploration in public attractions. I mean, we helped Dave and Buster's do their whole exploration in VR in 2012 before even Oculus had head tracking. Built our own head tracking motion control bases, computer controlled fans to do a four player driving game to see how long do people want to do it? Do they care about the cleanliness? And we continue to do a lot of those kind of corporate branded attractions, escape room like thing for Warner Brothers and even a cloud that rains tequila for the Mexican Board of Tourism. But in putting, you know, thousands, tens of thousands of people through VR at the Super Bowl and the Olympics and whatnot, we really got a kind of, you know, We started to hate, frankly, putting VR in public. I mean, it's very low throughput, right? There's all sorts of problems. And two of the places we landed that are really sweet spots for public VR is, is it fun for other people to watch while you're doing it? And can you get asymmetric play, right? Where you have one person in VR, but maybe a series of people outside of VR that are contributing to the action somehow, right? You're in VR as Godzilla destroying the city. Five of us get Xbox controllers and a big projector in order to be able to be the tanks in the same world.
[00:06:05.489] Eric Gradman: Brent, you remember our first VR experiment? Ooh, are you talking about, was it the Pac-Man one? Oh, no, that was super late. We could talk about that one. Oh, my God. No, we created, it was the Nordic track thing where we had people in VR on those back and forth Nordic track, like moving your legs back and forth like you're skiing things. And we were trying to do VR gaming. No game was, there was no game that was built for VR. Literally, it was like 2D on top of your eyeballs. But the way you would control this thing was by moving your legs back and forth. And that's an example of like taking two things that clearly do not belong together, right? Nordic track system as a game controller doesn't make sense until you try it, and then it does, and that definitely checks that same box. It was super funny to watch people play this thing. It was super fun to play, but it was super funny to watch.
[00:06:52.846] Brent Bushnell: But you know, omnidirectional treadmills weren't a thing, and we needed some way to add locomotion, and I thought that was a really genius thing you came up with.
[00:07:00.170] Eric Gradman: You know, you mentioned our Pac-Man thing. I am proud, I am very proud to have created a VR installation that 100% of the time makes people sick. Without fail. I couldn't even test it for more than two minutes because I was just doubled over. It was so bad.
[00:07:19.448] Brent Bushnell: We confirmed that moving the camera recklessly is a bad idea. And this was a seven player experience, one person in VR, and you had this big controller, this huge trackball, three foot trackball in front of you. You are first person Pac-Man. Standing behind him, you're rolling Pac-Man through the maze. And then seven other people are at one of our arcade cabinets, which is a seven-player arcade game, and they're the ghosts. Or, sorry, six-player, and they're the ghosts. And so, you know, seven people all in the same world, only one in VR, but, you know, the ghosts have this beautiful top-down view, and it's just like the Pac-Man you'd expect. But the person in VR, you know, as their camera is sliding all over the place, it just is, in seconds, feels terrible.
[00:07:57.031] Eric Gradman: And it was just a race. It was a race to see, will the ghosts win? Will the player win? Or will the player give up? War of attrition, yeah.
[00:08:06.209] Kent Bye: Well, we're here in the 2-Bit Circus, which I guess recently opened. So maybe you could talk a bit about that decision point, which you were transitioning from all these prototypes and projects for other people's brands and really experimenting, prototyping, seeing what works and seeing what was interesting, and then translate that into what you have now with where we're at, which is like this super carnival VR arcade slash immersive theater slash escape room slash carnival using technology. So maybe you could talk about that decision point and that journey to where we are today.
[00:08:37.003] Brent Bushnell: Great. Well, you know, it's really the culmination of a decade or more of, of exploration. And, and if there was a few sort of fundamental things, we built a bunch of stuff for brands that we would take to events, South by Southwest CES, whatever. And inevitably you spend all this time building a thing, you install it in an event, and then at some point South by ends. And on average, those attractions go in the trash, right? For the most part, the brand has no place to put it afterwards. Maybe they'll rent a storage facility because they don't want to burn all the money that they just spent. But for the most part, there's no place for that stuff to live afterwards. And so we had this ongoing frustration of like, oh, we just built a thing that people clearly loved. I can't believe we're going to throw it away now. But there was no place for it to go. And then, you know, the other piece was we'd been building a bunch of our own stuff and popping it up and we'd taken it to parties and done all the entertainment for Amazon's holiday party and then ultimately did our own traveling carnival. But, you know, that carnival was two football fields of content, right? 120,000 square feet of stuff that we would set up for a weekend. You know, I mean, we are masochists and total workaholics, but that's absurd. You know, I mean, to set that much stuff up for that short a time is really abusive. And so on the tail end of eight years of throwing away attractions for brands and popping our stuff up and taking it down, we finally were like, God, there's really got to be a permanent place that we can put all this stuff and landed our micro amusement park.
[00:09:56.824] Eric Gradman: We traded all those temporary problems for permanent problems, of course. But I wouldn't go back. I love having a place that's always open where people can come in seven days a week and play crazy games.
[00:10:07.688] Brent Bushnell: And, you know, we just installed our corporate offices in the front of it. And so we think of this L.A. facility as our wet lab, our petri dish. And it's set up in such a way that we are testing and iterating and tweaking during the day. And then we open the public at night and all of a sudden we get to validate those assumptions and see what doesn't work and iterate really quickly. And, you know, this is the beginning of a whole series of these that we're going to be rolling out. So we're already looking at subsequent locations and very excited to start to bring this beyond Los Angeles.
[00:10:36.434] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I found myself calling it a VR arcade because I am coming from the VR field and I see VR at a location. I'm like, that's a location based entertainment. It's a VR arcade. Like, what do you call it? What do you self identify as? How do you describe what you're doing?
[00:10:50.046] Eric Gradman: Well, look, we love VR. We are big fans. But VR only constitutes about 20% of the content here. We call this a micro amusement park. And we call it that because we've distilled all of our favorite kinds of entertainment, from VR to arcades to escape rooms. We've distilled that down to our favorite 38,000 square feet. And we've tried really hard to get a mix of different entertainment options, things for people who want to play alone, but mostly for people who want to play with others. Everything here is designed for people to make friends, to introduce themselves to new people, and to play together. And we see VR has a place there. But not every VR experience succeeds in that way. Many VR experiences just transport one person to another place, and you leave your friends behind. And that's not satisfying for us.
[00:11:37.855] Brent Bushnell: And I also say we're firm believers that everybody's a gamer, right? It just depends on what kind of game. Everybody likes play. And do you like solitaire? Do you like football? Do you like Dota? And my wife doesn't like VR. And so we definitely have lots of other stuff to sort of appeal to that broad palette of games, including a whole mezzanine that is old school parlor games from Britain. Wooden, the original bowling, something called Skittles, and a few other fun things. But, you know, we really wanted to be able to have a whole broad selection of stuff and so that as the tech changes, as tastes change, we can put a lot of different stuff in here.
[00:12:12.280] Eric Gradman: VR is a tool, and it's everyone's favorite tool right now. But it won't be everyone's favorite tool in two, three, four years. Who knows what's next? Maybe it's augmented reality. Maybe it's something completely different we haven't even thought of. This is a place where all of those technologies can thrive. And when people are coming out with crazy, haptic, direct neural interface games, well, damn it, we're going to have those here too.
[00:12:34.688] Kent Bye: Well, maybe you could take me on a little tour of what you have in terms of virtual reality, because we're sitting in a room that kind of feels like a karaoke room, but it's designed for people to come in and have their VR experience. And I noticed you have Birdly and other sort of haptic devices. Maybe you could just kind of run through what you have here in terms of virtual reality offerings.
[00:12:53.484] Brent Bushnell: You know, as Eric said, you know, we made up the term micro amusement park very intentionally, right? It's broken up into lots of different zones like an amusement park. And so the cabanas, what we call them where you're in right now, are a little bit like VR meets karaoke meets your living room. There's couches for your friends to sit. There's the VR headset for you to play. Big projector on the back wall. But then also, you know, the opportunity for couch social games with Xbox controllers. We're going to put actual karaoke in here so that this is really a party room with a variety of different tech. In specifically the arena area, which is, you know, most of the VR we have, there's a lot of real social stuff. We've got a holigate, which we love, you know, four player, you know, a selection of different games from shooters to, you know, a whole snowball fight, but also designed around exhibition. There are the four people playing, but there's also displays facing outward so the audience can watch. We built our own seated platforms. We took D-box chairs, ripped their arms off, added our own joysticks, and then worked with third party creators like Rebellion to adapt their battle zone for public. I worked with Ubisoft to bring their roller coasters onto that platform. But again, these were made both social as well as with exhibition. There's displays on the outside. We've got a bunch of Vive Pros in our kind of VR flex where you can go in a standard room scale. We've got the Raft, from Starbreeze and Red Interactive, a four-player shooter using MSI backpacks and HTC headsets. You're floating down a haunted river, defending the raft from crazy attackers, and every now and again the raft catches fire. You've got to reach down and grab the fire extinguisher to put it out. So some great, yeah, definitely great. And Asterion, a walkthrough adventure with some great haptic effects. Running two different experiences, kind of a haunted maze and Ubisoft Rabbids.
[00:14:32.984] Eric Gradman: And you know, the out-of-home experience when it comes to VR is somewhat different than the in-home experience. You're gonna be in a place surrounded by people you might not know, and even in those cases where you're playing a VR game all by yourself, but you showed up with friends and you're leaving those friends behind in the real world, what are those friends gonna do? And so we have arcade games strategically placed to allow new friends to be created, Oh, your buddy's in VR? Well, so is mine. Let's play a game together. And so it's all about that whole experience from the moment you walk in the door to the moment you leave, keeping it social, even if your friends are in VR.
[00:15:07.745] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I'm curious to hear what VR experiences are really resonating with people. I know Beat Saber, within the larger community, there's a big excitement around it. And I'm just curious to hear what people are being drawn to, what seems to be the popular draws. Yeah.
[00:15:21.291] Brent Bushnell: You know what has really been amazing to me is social VR, where four people are in the same experience, right? Hologate is markedly different, right? People are coming here for social, right? We're getting groups of two, four, five, eight, ten people, and they love the idea that they're all in VR at the same time. You've got the headset, you're talking to each other, that level of social. Even though you can't physically look each other in the face, the fact that you're in the same experience and you have the same audio track together is a big difference, and I'm really loving it.
[00:15:51.431] Eric Gradman: Even the difference between the same experience played by yourself or played with others is different, right? Like, take the same experience, you make it into a multiplayer thing, it's immediately so much more engaging. People just enjoy it more knowing that their friends are playing with them.
[00:16:08.188] Kent Bye: Well, for a micro amusement park that's only 20% VR, you have probably more VR than I've seen in most location-based entertainment VR arcades. So there's plenty of stuff happening, but you also have other things. I just briefly saw the interactive theater, which there was advertising for wine tasting games. Maybe you could talk a bit about what type of stuff you've been doing. Describe the room and then what you're able to do with this interactive theater. Sure.
[00:16:32.130] Eric Gradman: So you were walking into a room that we call Club 01. And Club 01 is our interactive game show theater. We love game shows. Game shows are super fun. But most people don't get to play game shows. They only get to watch them. But in Club 01, everyone gets to be part of the game show. We've created a room with 23 tables, four people per table. So almost 100 people can sit in this theater. There's a stage, a cabaret-style stage up front, and a host on that stage running a show. Everybody in that room, maybe they're answering questions in a trivia game. Maybe they're identifying the flavors they taste in wine they're sipping in our wine tasting show. We have a 23 team escape room style giant escape the room puzzle created by Scrap. There's a bunch of different types of fun entertainment you can do when you have touch screens in front of every single person. They're all networked together. Everyone is playing a game together.
[00:17:24.895] Brent Bushnell: So in addition to that theater, we also have a whole carnival midway. We've taken a lot of those classic carnival mechanics and smashed on some sensors and computer vision. We have what we call story rooms, our version of escape rooms. One of my favorites is this thing called Space Squad in Space. It's a four to six player adventure. You're on the bridge of a starship. And if you've ever played Space Team or Bridge Crew, it's a little bit like that in real life, right? You've got the pilot, the gunner, the navigator, You're all on the bridge of the starship, and we're all working together to not crash into a planet. We have our, you know, a modern arcade, including, you know, a lot of our favorites, like Killer Queen, and then a bunch of stuff that we made ourselves. A sort of riff on the classic skee-ball, a four-player cabinet polycade made by my brother Tyler, and then we've worked with some third-party developers to adapt some great, you know, Steam games to public, including Hidden in Plain Sight and Death Squared.
[00:18:18.110] Eric Gradman: We also have a top-notch restaurant and a full bar, including an awesome robot bartender who makes a mean martini.
[00:18:26.556] Brent Bushnell: We have the sort of the unicorn of liquor licenses, which includes full alcohol and kids, which you might find impossible. But the fact that most of our revenue comes from drinking, you know, food and people playing the entertainment kind of allows us to be able to do that. And then, you know, the food side, you know, it was super important to me that we make sure that the food is good and, you know, and organic and, you know, really high quality. So we sort of not so jokingly call it farm to circus.
[00:18:52.793] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, it seems like that this is a space that's designed for people to come and interact and play together. And I'm curious what the reaction has been, if this is a market need that people find that there's not a lot of other options for them to have an experience quite like this. I'm just curious what you've been finding so far since you opened.
[00:19:10.080] Eric Gradman: New friendships. We see them being created all the time. It's the coolest thing. People really want to be social. We run a couple of games in Club Zero One in that interactive game show theater where we ad hoc create new teams that include multiple tables. People who have never met one another, they are now playing together. They didn't choose to do that, But they've been thrust together. You know what? They leave friends. They keep talking afterward. High fives are exchanged between tables. I mean, and that's just in Club Zero One. Midway games that are designed for four to six people, right? You're always going to have a crowd of people who don't know one another. And people who play together keep hanging out together. They go to the bar and get a drink together. And we see this time and time again. It works.
[00:19:54.304] Brent Bushnell: Yeah. And I, you know, I'd say that, you know, it's been fun to see the range of people coming through, right? We, you know, a seven year old is having a great time. I wouldn't say we're that great for below seven, but, you know, seven to 15, you know, are having a blast. And then, but then we've also are getting folks, you know, in their 60s, 70s and 80s having a great time. And so there's really, you know, again, because there's such a collection of different stuff, there's kind of something for everyone.
[00:20:18.083] Kent Bye: Well, you also mentioned that you said that you were obviously rapidly iterating and constantly putting stuff out, but you're also planning on putting more different types of stuff here. So maybe we could talk about what you have to come. Just that process of launching anything, it takes time to put it together, but actually opening your doors and then with this kind of rapid prototyping mindset, I think is a little different than most people who haven't done a lot of these types of small projects.
[00:20:42.119] Eric Gradman: We have a policy that if we warn people that they're going to get splinters by playing this game, then forewarned is forearmed. We take stuff straight out of that workshop, we pop it down on the floor and we let people play. Because I would rather learn that a brand new game is terrible than spend too much time developing it and realize that late in the game.
[00:21:01.172] Brent Bushnell: And, you know, I'd say we race to get open and have about only 65% of our stuff out there right now. And so we're really we're putting a whole new round of stuff out. And some of the stuff I'm the most excited about is, you know, we've got all the attractions you can see, all the stuff we just described. There's a lot of stuff you don't see. And we have what we call the meta game, which is, you know, a whole narrative that spans the whole park. There's backstory. There are distributed elements. And you could think of this as a little bit of a scavenger hunt, a little bit of alternate reality game. There's really a deep rabbit hole here, a series of deep rabbit holes. And so there's going to be a lot more of that stuff starting to leak out in the coming months.
[00:21:39.258] Eric Gradman: The nice thing is that we control this place. It's our platform for building stuff. We can put Easter eggs in the games. We can hide stuff in the ceiling. We can do whatever we want.
[00:21:49.762] Brent Bushnell: It's awesome. And, you know, to that end, you know, at Park as platform, you know, we're loving collaborating with third party creators, right? Other people out there with great stuff. We want to be, you know, a place to exhibit your stuff. We've set this up a little bit like iTunes, right? People, you know, have a, you know, it's free to get in, but people get a little stored value card, which allows us to do revenue splits, you know, as people play, you know, attractions. And so we're really looking for great creators to be able to, you know, get their stuff out in front of the public.
[00:22:17.366] Kent Bye: Well, it seems like you are doing a deep dive into agency and games. And I'm curious if you have any design frameworks or insights of what makes a good game.
[00:22:27.889] Eric Gradman: What makes a good game? Simple. Yeah. Oh, the best games are always simple.
[00:22:33.631] Brent Bushnell: We've managed to overcomplicate every single thing we've ever tried to do. You know, so simple where, you know, my dad used to always say easy to learn and possible to master. You know, you want to, and we've seen time and again, you are a different person in public than you are at home. When you're at home, you are relaxed, you're in a safe place, you've got your glass of wine, whatever it is, you'll take the time to read the instructions or take the time to learn it. In public, you might be on a date, you're with a colleague, there's all sorts of other conditions around where you're not going to maybe take that time. And so simplicity is almost more important in public than anywhere else because you want to be able to just be up and running, Super fast. So particularly in public entertainment, you want that, you know, in public, it can't be too long. You know, we're seeing, hey, you know, 30, 20, 10 minutes, even 20 minutes is a real sweet spot. If the three of us all came out, you know, for a night out and two of you wanted to go into the one hour escape room, I'm sort of hosed, right? I might as well be on my, you know, at a different restaurant. And so, you know, length is important. And then the other one, you know, particularly when you're talking about public is durability, right? Assume everything you put in the hands of the public will break, right? And so, you know, it's just how fast. And so you really, you know, making sure that you've really, you know, dialed things up so you can at least have it last, you know, the week.
[00:23:47.168] Eric Gradman: This stuff is all designed to withstand the two most powerful forces of nature, drunks and children. We've been doing pretty good so far.
[00:23:56.254] Kent Bye: Well, it seems like there's a lot of physics-based things in this principle of making a prediction and you expressing your agency and your will into this experience. And you are matching up what the result is based upon what you expected. And so you're trying to cultivate this. Either it's surprising or novel, or you're able to complete that loop where you're making a prediction and being able to actually express your agency in a way that's actually able to accomplish whatever goal it is.
[00:24:19.795] Eric Gradman: You know, I feel like a good game is a little bit like a good joke. You know, there's the setup and there's the punchline. And if you can pull both of those off, people are gonna leave laughing. And they have to be simple, they have to be short. And that's all it takes, you know, just set it up, knock it down.
[00:24:37.711] Kent Bye: Well, I've been talking to a lot of game designers and there's this principle of like we have these interactions and then it creates some sort of experience, some sort of feeling or emotion. And I'm wondering if you think about like what type of emotions you're trying to curate in these experiences.
[00:24:53.171] Brent Bushnell: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're big fans of wonder. I mean, for you to evoke a little bit of that, our metagame, I think, I hope we start to be able to really get some senses of wonder. I mean, it goes without saying, but joy is a major part of this. And we've turned away from super horror things in favor of joyful and cheerful as maybe a brand expression as much as anything else. And so, yeah, emotion is definitely an important part for us.
[00:25:21.661] Eric Gradman: We also stay away from competition too much. We love competition. People are totally motivated by competition. But we don't want to overdo it. We don't have people playing eye to eye here. We have people playing elbow to elbow. We want people playing together, not against one another. And we don't maintain that throughout the entire place. Of course, we've got some shoot-em-up games. We've got some competitive games. But on the whole, when we assess a new game, our first question is, does this get people leaving having made new friends?
[00:25:49.471] Kent Bye: Now, I wanted to ask about because you both presented at the Immersive Design Summit within the context of immersive theater, there's this blending of agency and storytelling. There's this element of you're expressing your will into an experience, but you're also receiving something. And I think that is one of the most difficult design problems that we have for how you give and receive and be able to talk and listen in an experience. And because you're doing things in such a short context, like how does story or how does narrative design kind of fit into this overall thing that you're doing?
[00:26:19.102] Brent Bushnell: I really, you've touched on maybe one of my favorite things, right? Which is that, you know, classic entertainment was really passive. Books, movies, theater, television, you're sort of entertained at. Whereas the big C change is this active, right? Whether you're talking about VR, AR, immersive theater, escape rooms, right? You have a role to play. There's a reason for you to be here. And if you just sort of wait for everything to happen, you're not going to have a great time, right? It's sort of on you to go out and peel the onion back and explore and figure out what's going on. And, you know, that's a really exciting whole new category. And I think, frankly, the way that humans are going to learn and, you know, engage in fitness and therapy and, you know, definitely entertainment. But there's going to be all these other categories because, you know, game mechanics are motivating, you know. And, you know, you'll play, you might be on a treadmill and like, when the hell is this thing over? And you'll play a game of soccer with a broken foot, you know. And it's like when your head's in the game, you kind of, everything else kind of falls to the wayside.
[00:27:13.203] Eric Gradman: Yeah, I've been putting a lot of thought into exactly that question as an engineering design question. You know, you want to create experiences that allow people to express themselves, that allow them to step out of the bounds that you may have imagined. But you don't want them to step so far out that they ruin their own experience, break the story, or ruin everyone else's experience. So designing experiences that accommodate that kind of creativity in your guests that are resilient to people basically trolling you. And no matter who walks into that place, everyone has to leave having a good time. Can we solve that in an engineering way? Can we solve that with algorithms? Can we solve that with good planning? And I'm starting to believe that we can, because on the software side, we've implemented all sorts of fail-safes to keep the experience moving, even if someone just trolling the crap out of everybody else. So it's a really fun thing to experiment with, and we have such a great Petri dish here.
[00:28:06.291] Kent Bye: Well, when I walked into the immersive theater, I saw that there was the wine tasting quiz show. And I thought, wow, that is a brilliant idea because you're inviting people into this place to play games. But now you've gamified the process of cultivating your palate to be able to taste. So as you cultivate that palate, you're going to become more sensitive and your depth of sensory experience is just going to become so much richer. So you have taste and potentially smell. So I'm just curious, because we see a lot within VR about haptics and the feel of things, but I haven't seen as many things about taste or smell, so I'm curious how you're incorporating those other senses.
[00:28:42.099] Eric Gradman: The nice thing about a wine-tasting show as opposed to VR is we don't have to simulate anything. You actually have wine in front of you, so you smell it, you taste it, because it's wine.
[00:28:52.631] Brent Bushnell: I'm working on a cocktail fortune telling experience right now. And we've always been big fans of, it's about the experience and what tools are there out there. And in looking at that cocktail fortune telling experience, spanning a little bit of tech, obviously the actual cocktails that you're going to get, but even some simple classic mechanics that you'd pull from haunted houses and sticking your hand into boxes that you can't see and what's going on. And that's just a tactile effect, but stitched into the story in the right way and all of a sudden really, really powerful. And, you know, this particular thing happens to be an intimate thing for two people. So, you know, trying to break down social barriers even between two people on a date.
[00:29:31.701] Eric Gradman: Yeah, VR has a long way to go before it can match the realism of the real world.
[00:29:37.250] Kent Bye: Well, I often ask creators of both virtual reality or augmented reality what they personally want to experience in those mediums. But I'm curious what each of you want to experience and the types of either experience that you're creating yourself or just in general, what kind of experiences that you want to have?
[00:29:54.028] Brent Bushnell: I got one. You know, I want more of Ready Player One flick sync, right? I want to see a volumetric video that I can walk around inside of. And so imagine that I could, like a superhero, pause time and scrub back and forth but either be a character in that scene and only if I do it right does the scene advance, but that I do have some agency to be able to walk around. Well, this is not a 360 video, right? I'm talking about like Intel's huge capture stage or meta stage, but being able to walk around a video experience as if I was literally James Bond in the middle of a casino or, you know, just I want that so badly. Yeah.
[00:30:35.749] Eric Gradman: I'm still a big fan of alternate reality. I know augmented reality and virtual reality are the hip thing right now, but I want to walk down the street with no headset on my head, and I want magical things to happen because the game system that's controlling, lightly controlling the environment I live in knows where I am, knows what I'm doing, and knows that now would be a great time to send me a creepy text message or have somebody pop out a window and scare me. I'm saying scare me because it's nearing Halloween time. But the point is, like, to modify my environment, just like the movie The Game, but for everybody, all the time, dynamically. That's what I want.
[00:31:13.030] Kent Bye: Nice. And finally, what do you each think is the ultimate potential of these virtual and augmented reality technologies or immersive entertainment and what they may be able to enable?
[00:31:25.741] Brent Bushnell: I mean, I'm a huge fan of Chris Milk's thesis around empathy. You know, the idea that you can put on a headset or, you know, try on an experience that is nothing to do with your life, right, gives you a window into somebody else's life is really powerful. And not just VR. You know, I... to an immersive theater experience where we were volunteering at a homeless shelter and we made sandwiches and learned all about homeless and and we were the sandwiches we actually made actually went to the homeless right we were in an immersive theater experience but we were actual volunteers and learning about this medium and so you know this is entertainment this is philanthropy this is you know it was really a powerful you know message for me and and i think that I can't wait for more of that stuff, right? Being able to use this entertainment as a way to put you in a place that might make you uncomfortable, put you in a place that motivates you to change in some way and gives you exposure to aspects of life that you might not see otherwise.
[00:32:18.291] Eric Gradman: Yeah, I'm totally going to echo that. I think empathy is really important, and I think these technologies can help provide it. We live in a world full of people who can't get along with one another right now. Providing an alternative venue where people can see each other eye to eye in a way they never would in reality is a great way to get people connected again.
[00:32:35.790] Brent Bushnell: I think back to years of my original inspiration, Michael Douglas in The Game. And what happens in that? He starts out a total dick, goes through this wild adventure, and is buried alive in Mexico, and comes back. And after having dealt with all of the really hard problems of all the people that he encounters, he finally learns what it is to be human. And it was an incredible movie and a really, really great arc.
[00:33:02.270] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the VR, AR, or immersive theater community?
[00:33:08.414] Brent Bushnell: You know, I mean, think of us as your movie theater for interactive. We're always looking for great creators out there who have cool stuff they want to showcase. We're opening more sites and want to be a venue to help bring you some audience. So please don't hesitate to reach out.
[00:33:22.844] Eric Gradman: I have nothing to add. Okay.
[00:33:24.405] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. So thank you. Thanks for this. This is great.
[00:33:27.447] Eric Gradman: Thanks. This has been great.
[00:33:28.973] Kent Bye: 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.
