Here’s my interview with the co-founders of Dream Park, Brent Bushnell & Aidan Wolf, that was conducted on Wednesday, June 11, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. 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 spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing my series of looking at AWE past and present, today's interview is with Dream Park and the co-founders of Brent Bushnell and Aidan Wolfe. So Dream Park is like a downloadable theme park where they're using mixed reality devices like the Quest 3 in order to create these kind of amusement park types of events and activities. You can kind of think about if you were in a first person perspective of Super Mario World, that was kind of like what it felt like. You were going around collecting coins, hitting bricks, and they're doing this in a way where you have to hold up the Quest 3 to your face. And then as you hold it up, then you're... creating this different relationship between you and the technology, because it feels more ephemeral where you could quickly take it on and off. And so it's kind of like a more bite-sized way of like, you know, the headsets were not designed for you to hold them up to your face, but they found that that's actually like the fastest way to get people into the experience. It's just let them hold it up to their face, like from zero into the experience within like less than a minute, you know, a matter of seconds, actually. And so because of that, then they've created this new hack, which is that they're in this place on the Santa Monica sidewalk mall where there's like all of this open space, kind of like semi-public space. That's a part of that complex of all these different shops on this mall. And the owners of the place want people to have more foot traffic. So they're very interested in actually working in, and in some ways like actively promoting their business in order to get more throughput of people coming to go check out some of these different experiences. Yeah. So it's really kind of an interesting and novel business model where they're looking at the problem of like, how do we generate more foot traffic to these different spaces and bringing this downloadable theme park called Dream Park and being able to quickly scale up from here. So I'd be very curious to see how they continue to expand this out and also eventually getting into more augmented reality glasses where you don't have to hold up this mixed reality device up to your face since it's really not the optimal form factor, but it does give people a little bit more caution than just throwing something on your head and running around in public. So really quite fascinating to dive into a little bit more into the origin stories of Dream Park. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Brent and Aiden happened on Wednesday, June 11th, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Log Beach, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:38.864] Brent Bushnell: My name is Brent Bushnell. I'm an engineer and an entrepreneur and a co-founder of Dream Park. We're building downloadable theme parks so we can place just about anywhere. I'm Aiden Wolf.
[00:02:47.232] Aidan Wolf: I'm co-founder of Dream Park as well. I really love building stuff in augmented reality. I think it's the future of everything.
[00:02:54.219] Kent Bye: Awesome. Maybe you can each give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space.
[00:02:58.924] Brent Bushnell: I started building in VR with DK Ones that we got directly from Palmer himself to build an attraction for Dave and Busters. In the early days, they were like, hey, how long do people want to do it? Do they care about the cleanliness? What are they willing to pay? What's the operational overhead? They had a lot of real practical questions about running VR for the public. But there weren't attractions at that point. A lot of the ones that had built in the 90s were all gone. And so we built a four-player driving game, actually put head tracking into Oculus before even the Oculus had head tracking, and then sort of a skydiving experience. And so we deployed those to Irvine and a couple of other locations in order to be able to test that. Got me hooked. We launched VR for Samsung at the Olympics and the Super Bowl, and that was an experience. We went and toured around all the Verizon stores, and then later opened up our own theme park, a micro amusement park in the middle of downtown LA called 2-Bit Circus, about a half a city block, interactive entertainment, a bunch of VR, free roam VR. And at that time, 2017, we designed it. You needed thousands of dollars of trust, $2,000 computer, $2,000 headset, cables, all to get a five-foot radius. And that's if you didn't commit to a backpack computer and all that suffering. And, you know, to think that here we are eight years later and we can just hold a headset to your face and walk infinitely is truly magical.
[00:04:10.819] Aidan Wolf: Yeah, I started as an animator, became game developer, became social app maker, which then turned into social AR. And my goal has always been to use technology to bring people closer together. And that's like the motivating factor. I kind of have this image in my head of a bunch of kids seeing dinosaurs kind of run into their neighborhood and realize that they could all kind of study and play with those dinosaurs together and yeah i think ar is fundamentally this new technology for community for connection and that's culminated into dream park which is a combination between games play community and augmented reality so it's kind of the best best of all of everything i care about
[00:04:53.547] Brent Bushnell: You know, I was just thinking as you were saying that, that, like, the native game design of reality is, like, bad, you know?
[00:05:00.349] Aidan Wolf: I call it the vanilla version of reality, and we're looking for mods. Like, we need mod packs. It's just like Skyrim or anything. It's like, oh, why did we accept the base game? Like, yes, it is.
[00:05:13.872] Brent Bushnell: It's just so perfect. And so think of Dream Park as your first mod packs on reality. And so for us, being able to turn your entire town into a place where the antique store is the weapons dealer, the central square is where you do the boss battle, you get the special clue from the witch that lives out in front of the church. All of those become places that you recognize but have now been turned into something spectacular.
[00:05:39.546] Aidan Wolf: And even thinking, you know, the witch who lives in the scary house down the road is actually just one of your elderly neighbors who is looking for a little more company because their kids don't visit as much. And now this game is like giving everyone what they want. You know, the kid wants some action and mystery. The adults just want a little companionship and conversation that they don't usually get.
[00:05:59.098] Brent Bushnell: The witch is misunderstood. Once you get to the final level, you realize she's just like you.
[00:06:05.442] Aidan Wolf: And now you're enjoying Apple Pie, real Apple Pie, not virtual Apple Pie, because you made a friend in your town. So that's what I hope to see.
[00:06:14.383] Kent Bye: Well, the last time that we had a chance to talk was back at Tubic Circus when you were still running this place and then pandemic hit. And then last time we chatted was last year at the Snap Partner Summit where you're talking about spectacles and talking about some of the similar types of things, but with the spectacles, glasses, AR glasses. So maybe you just catch me up for each of your journeys like from that point and how you two came together to start to collaborate on Dream Park.
[00:06:38.135] Brent Bushnell: You know, interestingly, after COVID, we got Tubit back open after being closed for 18 months and under restriction for 12. You know, it was really suffering, really impossible time for LBE, as you all know. And as we did that, you know, Tubit had gone remote. And so we had in downtown, we had the 38,000 square foot amusement park and 12,000 square feet office space. And that office space was then mostly empty. So we turned that into what we called the creator campus, which was together with Aiden, this space for creators to come and build and play and just experiment. And frankly, the way that 2-Bit had done it, which was to build it in the office and then drag it to the amusement park to be able to test, we sort of opened up to creators to be able to do the same thing. Aiden and a bunch of others got together, started playing around, building stuff, and I had my first sort of mixed reality, brain-breaking moment when Aiden was like, hey, here's this drift trike, here's this coin collection in 2-Bit's parking lot. And I pedaled a drift trike, chasing somebody else in a multiplayer game, collecting coins, avoiding barriers, you know, and took off the headset and there was nothing there. It was just an empty parking lot, you know, but here I had got my heart rate up to 150 trying to catch these coins, you know, in a world that didn't exist. And it really was so next level. I was just... captivated.
[00:07:50.630] Aidan Wolf: To circle on that idea that this started at 2-Bit Circus, it's like you gave a bunch of nerds a wonderland to play with and said, basically, do whatever you want. And our brains just expanded really big. Usually when you're doing AR or mixed reality, you have to think of all these real world conditions. You start to really shrink what you're working on to the point that it's like a tabletop game by the end. It's not this sprawling RPG. But then we looked at 2-Bit and we're like, it's 50 000 square feet of alleys games things that we could do we just started you know putting in our games and from there once we filled that entire arcade with a couple attractions it was like well these attractions should be connected together why don't i just like put on a headset front door and start walking around go to the drift strike racetrack outside then i'm doing wizard dueling and in the inside it was just kind of like the perfect combination of things that you know we had to go to lbe to realize what it would take to do this and now we basically have like an lb in a box the size of a headset a face box you know and that would be the goal right a two-bit circus that you could set up in any empty mall retail space you know in an afternoon or weekend and then just start entertaining people bringing people together so Yeah, that would be the goal. And I don't know, how long did you take to make?
[00:09:04.882] Brent Bushnell: Not to say it's the same thing at all, but yeah, so long and so many millions of dollars and so much space. And you think about like landlord lease commitment, build out time, you know, just the the amount of complexity fractalizes everywhere you look, you know, and to think that you could say, There's a soccer field in every town in America, and we build an amount of content that you can bring a shipping, you know, you can bring literally a road case, say Origin 00 is this corner of the soccer field, and boom, you got a theme park. You know, I mean, that is next level magic, you know, and... the free roam ability and to do it socially and to be able to then actually see everybody else also, you know, and we've seen this on our space in the promenade to sort of finish the story. We ended up moving out of our place in downtown L.A., set up a little pop up, a two bit pop up on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. And from there, we had this ginormous walking mall. And so we started experimenting with, hey, what does the mixed reality look like using that walking mall? If you can see, if you have passed through video so you can see the potted tree and the stranger walking by and the curb that's right there, all of a sudden, you can take over 30,000 square feet of public space. And that's what we did.
[00:10:10.447] Aidan Wolf: I'd even think we're so used to it now that we have headsets going out into public, outdoors, with all these people playing while other people are walking and shopping. But it was really crazy when we first were doing it. We thought it was like there was a million things that could go wrong. We're thinking of all of them. But it worked like the tech works, the social factors worked, and it really just came down to like getting it on the promenade as soon as possible. We really just like quickly threw something together in a couple of weeks that we could start presenting to people. But I just yeah, I'm reminded now that we even thought it was like a bad idea, like a crazy idea. And now we're it's like our thing. Like it's like it's like this is just now going to be every main street, hopefully kind of thing. So.
[00:10:55.019] Brent Bushnell: I want to say, I think we were the first on Earth to do public mixed reality ticketed attractions. I've just, I don't know, I haven't heard of others. Ken, you might know. But the thing, you know, there was a lot of confusion. There was a lot of questions around, can the headsets even do it in the sun? You know, it turns out they can. The front is fine. The problem is on the inside optics. If you expose those to the sun for too long, you'll get little artifacting. But that part worked, and to Aiden's point, all the rest of the general public stuff worked, and it's really been amazing. And I kept imagining Santa Monica City to come by and be like, no, stop it. And then they were coming by and being, this is amazing, good job. And so it was fun to see each of the barriers just sort of melt away.
[00:11:33.068] Aidan Wolf: The promenade security would walk up to us looking scary. And then they'd be like, anything you need from us? Yeah, and we're like, oh, no, thanks. But we were like, oh, it's finally happened. They're shutting us down. So shout out to them for keeping us safe, honestly, as opposed to in trouble.
[00:11:50.096] Brent Bushnell: I think we've got our piece on the front page of the Santa Monica Daily Press. It came out today. So it was a little fun confirmation. It's never been so real.
[00:11:57.140] Aidan Wolf: It's never felt so real to actually see a screenshot of our game on the front page of a newspaper. It's kind of insane.
[00:12:04.846] Kent Bye: Have you launched out into the public now?
[00:12:06.527] Brent Bushnell: Yeah. It's available every Saturday and also during all of 2Bit's hours.
[00:12:10.670] Kent Bye: And so when did it launch? When was the first day that you went public with it?
[00:12:14.321] Brent Bushnell: You know, it's a little bit of a gray area. I would say we've been doing, we've been running it since January, but it's been kind of off and on as we've been testing and learning and building out the pieces that we needed. And, you know, there's been a whole iterative process of the operationalizing of it. You know, people will, a lot of time, this is people's first VR experience. And so how to get them in quickly, how to get them out quickly, how to get it just turned over is something that takes some experimentation.
[00:12:38.211] Aidan Wolf: And how do you actually make it, on a technology level, as easy as possible for staff to run it? And we've really just broken it down into a thing where it's like, if something goes wrong, just turn it off and turn it back on again. And all you have to do is hand the headset to people, and that's it. And that took a lot of work behind the scenes to just get it that simple. We actually call it the Chewy Test or Chewing Test because a staff member that we really needed to get this to work for, his name's Chewy. So we just were like, this is the perfect name. So now that's what we call it. Hey, if Chewy can use this, you know, like I think we can get this out to anyone. So, yeah.
[00:13:15.246] Kent Bye: One question around the affordance of the Quest 3S mixed reality headsets that you have here at Augmented World Expo is that there's no straps on any of the headsets. And you're asking people to hold the HMD up to their face. And so they can quickly take it on and off. But this is the first time that I've really seen the use of that. So I'm just curious what the design logic behind that is to have people holding these headsets rather than using the straps.
[00:13:39.466] Aidan Wolf: Great question. I'd say this is one of our key insights early on that's let us build out this concept and get it into as many people's hands as we have. Yeah, it's straps are hard to get on and you need a staff member to adjust them usually, which means staff member needs to know how to adjust them. And then people often don't actually know how a headset should sit on their face. So they'll say, oh, it looks good to me. And then you get the headset back and you realize it's been out of focus or blurry the entire time. So once we just were like, it's taking too long to strap people in, it was kind of like, well, what if we just rip the straps off? And it was like, can we do that? well, let's try, and then we took them off, and then we ran tests that day, and you realize 90% of people out on the street have never done VR before, or don't even know what it's supposed to be like, so you hand them a headset, they hold it up, they're not asking for straps, they're like, oh, I guess this is the way mixed reality is. And it's led to just so many great insights around you know, especially with women, they don't have straps messing up their hair. They can hold it and apply pressure as they want so it doesn't mess up their makeup. And then kids as well, there's not a strap small enough for a kid to wear. So we've actually been able to lower the age of experience to like two years old, three years old, four years old because they can hold it as well. And that was just like Probably one of the most important decisions we made early on with the hardware. And now it allows it to be self-serve, so people can just grab a headset and go play. They don't need anyone to help them.
[00:15:09.787] Brent Bushnell: There's also no controllers. This is literally just the headset. We're using hand tracking. So again, back to that simplicity, you are in and out in milliseconds, single-digit seconds at the worst.
[00:15:22.115] Aidan Wolf: Time to experience was key, and we have it down to a second.
[00:15:27.329] Brent Bushnell: For me, in public, when you're holding it there, the default state is off. And so you can kind of easily check, hey, I'm walking around, you know, is that really there, the thing that I think it might be there? It sort of removes the friction of pulling it off your face, too, which I think is a special thing.
[00:15:42.991] Aidan Wolf: That's exactly it. It's much safer because you can decide your level of immersion just by taking the headset off and it allows the experience to extend beyond just the play. We see people grab the headset, they play for a couple minutes, then they take it off and chat with their friend for a couple minutes, talk about what they just experienced, then they put it back on. So it allows it to be a part of an existing social experience, like going out to the bar or hanging out with your friends, as opposed to something that you're now 100% committed to until you take it off. And oh, when you're strapped in, the second you take it off, it's over. You're not putting the straps back on. So yeah, that's just the key one. We feel a lot better that people aren't running at 15 miles an hour with a strapped-on headset. I'll tell you that. They can look if they need to.
[00:16:32.913] Kent Bye: So maybe you could describe a bit more context of the space that you're deploying this out in Santa Monica. Is it a parking lot? Is it a street? Or is it a public space, private space?
[00:16:43.399] Brent Bushnell: It's a walking mall. So there's four blocks of the Santa Monica Third Street that is a cars-only pedestrian mall. No cars allowed, pedestrian mall. Cars only. And so we've taken over that northernmost block. It's probably 30,000 square feet.
[00:16:59.265] Aidan Wolf: Yeah, so you basically just have a giant sidewalk for just people. And it's essentially the perfect environment we could hope for. It's nice and shady, but it's that perfect LA weather. And it's really let us experiment and test and get a concept that works. But the goal is to make this work everywhere. We're running this in a couple of public parks now, Yerba Buena Gardens. We want this to be in, you know, Westfield malls, indoor facilities, retail spaces, revive those like middle America strip malls that have just been kind of laid abandoned where people don't really know what to do with them anymore. Now it could be a laser tag arena, escape room, a miniature Disney World. Like it could be all these things. And I think That's what the next generation will be looking for now that they're used to, you know, jumping into Roblox, Fortnite, Horizons, and they enter into, you know, 10 different worlds on a given day. I think when they go out into real life, they're going to maybe expect the same. Oh, I'm going to do LARPing in the park. You got a Lord of the Rings raid going on. Then I'm going to, you know, go downtown and there's a, you know, a battle royale laser battle. Like, it's like, what's your afternoon like? And that's, I think, will be the usual for the next group of people.
[00:18:10.965] Brent Bushnell: I've got a zombie infestation I'm dealing with, so I'll meet you later. Exactly.
[00:18:15.909] Aidan Wolf: Better zombies than cockroaches is what I always say.
[00:18:20.654] Brent Bushnell: I'll just go back also to common areas. There's a lot of common area space, and you think about a mall. This is the area that's got the fountain, and they might have some vending machines. It's going to get you from one store to the other. But usually they're made ginormous. you know, way more space than you need for the amount of people that are rolling through there. And so to be able to use that too, and now you might have a walking adventure that takes you between a number of different locations. We were talking with one mall owner who was thrilled that it might, you know, take an adventure that takes you into one of the retail stores and then over to the food court and then back to the parking lot. And so the sort of dynamism of having this sort of toolkit for theme parks that we can deploy in all sorts of different sized spaces. So really powerful.
[00:19:00.075] Aidan Wolf: We had someone who's been in virtual reality and LV for a really long time, probably 10 years, 15 years or longer, probably was doing it in the 90s actually as well. When we showed them the experience, they looked around and they went like, there's no ropes. It's not roped off. And they were actually concerned at first because they're like, you're going to put a headset on me and people are walking through. But they put on the headset, they jumped into mixed reality. And it completely changed their mindset around the work that they've been doing for a really long time. They were like, yeah, no ropes. This is great. You know, we don't need a rope off a public section of a mall to make this work. It works in that area. And I only bring that up because to me, I didn't come from LBE. So I'm like, that sounds crazier to me that you'd rope it off. But to them, they're like, you needed to. It was for safety. And so I'm glad we never had that, like, even thought to begin with, because, yeah, it was always about occupying these public spaces, just like two bit. I mean, there's people running around playing games, drinking, and then it needs to work in that environment as well.
[00:20:02.443] Kent Bye: And is there any formal permission or like payment of like, you know, landlord, like virtual landlord fees or like, or is this something that you're doing in, you know, up until people kick you out? Just trying to get a sense of like, what's the process for getting permission to do something like this?
[00:20:18.446] Brent Bushnell: So. You know, Dream Park's operating out of the front of 2-Bit's location on the promenade. In the other locations that we're going to be announcing shortly, it's directly with the location owner. And oftentimes, they're ecstatic. You know, I mean, they are looking for reasons to drive traffic to their location. And it completely changes the relationship. Our relationship with that landlord is now, we're not paying rent. We're helping to drive traffic to their location. I mean, we have one partner who's, they're going to be buying a billboard. they're driving traffic for it, driving marketing awareness as a reason for people to come. And so I think it really just completely changes the conversation with a landlord because of, it's fun, it's games, we're talking about exciting stuff that people want to do. And so it's really a different relationship.
[00:21:00.307] Aidan Wolf: Yeah, we have a minimum viable atoms philosophy is what we call it. And so one of the things early on was if we had to be a brick and mortar, we probably wouldn't build this company quite yet. So we really had to figure out how to work with brick and mortar, make this valuable to them. And so and now I see it with our business partners like we're getting paid to set up a dream park as opposed to paying to set up a dream park and then have to then figure out how to profit from there. That's like very new for VR, AR, LV and like, you know, location based entertainment in general. Like, you know, you're not going to get that type of free square footage. And so that's why we're kind of racing for now. Hey, let's get this in as many places as possible because we have this way that can work. We can scale pretty fast. So so that's been fun to figure out. You know, these are like You build products, which is like, you kind of get the rules, you build a thing, people have to have fun. But you also have to build that business strategy, and that business strategy has been fun to watch implemented now. Yeah, like, how do you convince a landlord that this is the best decision for their mall with 50% vacancy? And it's like, you focus on the vacancy, and they go, hey, have you got a turnkey solution for that that you could set up and be gone tomorrow? Let's do this. You know, why would we say no this is cheaper than our digital marketing budget to like start working with you Yeah, so and we get something cool out of it that no one else has ever seen.
[00:22:21.784] Kent Bye: So yeah, so yeah So I heard you had a recent appearance on Shark Tank to pitch this idea and you know Didn't sound like that you were able to get any investment directly out of that But maybe talk a bit about what came after your appearance on Shark Tank to pitch the Dream Park
[00:22:36.235] Brent Bushnell: Yeah, it was a really fascinating experience. You know, they pair you with a couple of producers and you work for months to, you know, craft what it is you're going to show and what the demonstration is. And, you know, we really wanted to put the sharks in headset, you know, and to have them do an actual wizard duel on camera. And so we had a live demo we set up right there in the moment. They actually put us at the top of the film schedule so that we'd be able to be, you know, the demo was set up and ready to go. The first time you see the sharks is the moment you walk in the room. We didn't see them behind those scenes or in the green room or anything. and we had two of them up there in a wizard battle, Mark Cuban throwing spells. And I think, and I would love to be corrected on this, I think at that point it was the biggest demonstration to the public of mixed reality on Earth so far.
[00:23:18.079] Aidan Wolf: Like 1.1 million concurrent viewers at the same time watching a mixed reality wizard battle on TV, on national mainstream TV, which is pretty cool. Yeah, Brent did a great job. The sharks didn't bite, but the momentum from Shark Tank propelled us into faster conversations with investors. So, we won out anyways just based on that. It was the best commercial we could have hoped for. And we got plenty of messages from people who saw it at home or want to work with us because of that appearance. So you can't beat that. Brendan, amazing job. And we were pretty early at that time, too. Something they don't tell you on Shark Tank is that you actually film it far in advance of the show. So that was probably a version of things that was, at that point, well over six months old, maybe nine months old. And we work pretty quick, so that was almost hard to watch. You're going like an old demo, but it's the first time a lot of people are seeing something like that anyways. So, yeah.
[00:24:14.224] Kent Bye: And I know that last time we talked, you were also doing a lot of similar things on the Spectacles headset. And so I'm just curious, as you move forward, if you expect to see like from the hold up this mixed reality headset up to your head, up to Spectacles and, you know, the tradeoffs between like the field of view and having to hold something up versus just putting something on your face and what you think the sweet spot is for what you're doing. And if you hope to be doing both or focusing on one or the other.
[00:24:38.831] Aidan Wolf: Exactly. So as far as we look at the hardware right now, the hardware is just the thing that gets people to the experience that we want to provide. And when we looked at all the available hardware, prices, availability, everything like that, we wanted to work with the Quest because it was just the best way to represent our experience today. It was easy to give to people, get them in, and have fun. It was the first time we handed people a device where they didn't even ask about the device. Like, they were just so into the experience that the headset was almost like the 3D glasses at the movie theater. You know, you're going to see Top Gun. You're not focused on the 3D glasses that you're holding, going, ooh, I wonder what kind of 3D glasses these are, you know, polarized, whatever. You're just there to watch a 3D movie, so... So Quest has let us get to that point, really focusing on what's fun and awesome today, where audiences are today. This is so many people's first experience, so we keep things very simple, fun, interaction-focused, but eventually people will want stories and bigger adventures. But it's just the hardware that gets us to the thing. Eventually these glasses, like spectacles, everything are just going to get really, really good. I think we could be such a cornerstone of distribution for this hardware where, you know, we get to get this hardware in all these locations, get people experiencing them. And then I think three to five years from now, people will start just bringing their devices from home, whether they're like the Quest 5 or the Spectacles, you know, 2028s, whatever those would be. People are just going to show up to a Dream Park wearing whatever they're wearing, and we just have the experience ready for them. I'm really looking forward to that time, but it doesn't mean we have to wait now to make a Dream Park a kind of a household name, you know, in every town kind of thing. You know, the hardware's here. It's Quest 3. It's ready. It's ready for the masses. It's a pretty amazing device, I will say. So, yeah. Anyways, yeah.
[00:26:35.567] Kent Bye: So we lost Brent to a phone call, so we'll just go ahead and wrap things up here.
[00:26:40.688] Aidan Wolf: In the future, he'd just have an AI hologram take his place. It would answer the questions the exact same way. It would be perfect. And then, you know, you wouldn't have to ever pause the interview. That's only, I would say, two years away or less. Awesome.
[00:26:57.726] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of mixed reality in all these kind of immersive games might be and what they might be able to enable?
[00:27:06.199] Aidan Wolf: Our tagline for Dream Park is making an earth worth playing. I think that mixed reality, augmented reality will be this amazing tool that will help us communicate better than we've ever been able to. It'll break down barriers between people. It'll induce a state of play, fun, leisure at all times, even when we're really stressed, when we're working hard, when we're at a party where we don't know anyone. Mixed reality, augmented reality is just going to be this tool that is going to help us just be comfortable, feel good, connect with people better than we've ever been able to connect before. And I think if that's all that comes out of it, it will still completely change the world. It will change our societies. It will make an Earth that's maybe more friends with each other. I really think it has that potential. And I think we'll get there through play. A bunch of people, rather than fighting each other, will just be going on adventures together. And I think that's a better world that I want to live in.
[00:28:01.953] Kent Bye: Anything else left unsaid you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:28:05.956] Aidan Wolf: Thank you for a decade of support, not only in just the friendships, but also all the people who are deep in these labs building this technology that we get to use and give to people. I think of everyone working on Spectacles and Quest. These are really hard problems, and now we just sit there offering the fun. But I think about that every time I use these devices. It's like... this was so hard to make. So if you're out there listening and you worked on these devices, thank you very much for making them. I want you to know that I'm a huge fan. Awesome.
[00:28:38.278] Kent Bye: And yeah, so I'm really excited to see where Dream Park is going here in the future. It was a lot of fun just to jump in, and there was that moment of like, kind of like a Super Mario World, collecting coins and jumping up, hitting bricks, and then up these lava pits. And then at the end, when I took it off, I was like, oh yeah, this was just all an empty space. And I think there was that moment of that realization of how much you had that augmented space of what was a void space, essentially, but how much you were able to transform it into a space of play. So yeah, I just had a really amazing experience with that. And yeah, I look forward to seeing where you are able to take Dream Park here in the future.
[00:29:10.605] Aidan Wolf: You've seen nothing yet. There's so much to come, so many improvements. But that really is it. If you expect people to spend all day in mixed reality, you have to make something so fun, so great, that when they take it off, they'd rather put it back on. And I think we've heard that feedback now a couple times. I think I'd rather be in the kind of Super Mario-like world while I'm hanging out at the mall or going out. And it's like, cool, that's where things need to be for this to work, I think. So that's what we're doing.
[00:29:40.685] Kent Bye: awesome thanks again for listening to this episode of the voices of your podcast and if you enjoy the podcast and please do spread the word tell your friends and consider becoming a member of the patreon this is a this is part of 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 voices of vr thanks for listening
