Here’s my interview with Ray Kallmeyer, Founder and CEO of Enklu and their 22 Verse Immersive AR LBE locations, that was conducted on Tuesday, June 10, 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 continue my series of AWE past and present. Today's interview is with Ray Kallmeyer. He's a part of Inclu, which does location-based entertainment for augmented reality at a series of different places around the world called Versa Immersive. And so at the Augmented World Expo, they were part of the Snap set of booths. And so outside of the main hall where a lot of different lectures were happening on the second floor, there was all of these kind of Snap booths with tons of different demos on the spectacles. And so Snap really got their money's worth for the partnership because they were amazing. right there for where all the different main talks were on the main stage and so right next to the main entrance was this experience called site craft which was sort of a cooperative collaborative experience where it's like an infinite runner where you're basically throwing these kind of like a dart like motion but kind of arcing and trying to hit with these orbs hitting these different targets essentially and so they were having competition to see like whoever got the highest score would get like a free spectacles or something like that but It was a really quite fun and engaging type of game. And I had a chance to sit down with Ray to talk a bit about how they're actually already deploying some of these snap spectacles into a location-based entertainment context. I suspect that that is going to be the place where most of the early people are going to be using the spectacles. I mean, like to have social experiences, a lot of fun, but it's not very likely that you're going to just happen to be in a place that has people that have the headsets and to get together at the time and place. So having a very site specific location based augmented reality place like versus immersive can start to leverage the use of these snap spectacles. And they've got their whole way for how they're managing like their limited battery and everything else. And so they've got kind of a whole way that they have figured out how many spectacles that they need in order to run their business. just had a chance to sit down and get a little bit more information from ray and their journey into creating these location-based augland reality experiences going all the way back to the wild garden which i had a chance to see on market street in san francisco while i was in town for one of the kind of immersive design summits there was an after party that was happening there and had a chance to check out the very very very early like the first iteration of the wild garden and it sounds like it's expanded out into like a whole much more extended and hour-long experience so Yeah, very curious to hear a little bit more about Inclu and what's happening on the realm of location-based entertainment and the realm of augmented reality. So I'll be covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices in VR podcast. So this interview with Ray happened on Tuesday, June 10th, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:54.597] Ray Kallmeyer: Hi, my name is Ray Kallmeyer. I'm the founder and CEO of NCLU. We run Verse Immersive, which is the world's largest and only location-based augmented reality network. We're in 20 different cities in five countries, and we're growing pretty fast, working with cinemas and family entertainment centers to bring a new form of AR media to families across the world.
[00:03:13.886] Kent Bye: Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:03:18.260] Ray Kallmeyer: So I started off in the video games industry, and I was making indie games, AAA games, first as a programmer, then as a designer, and then I helped build production teams for some of the bigger brands out there like Sony and NCSoft. And what I love about the games industry is all the incredible different creative inputs you get to bring together to make a project come to life. Designers, artists, marketers kind of working together. And then what I love about augmented reality is we can apply all those same sorts of ideas and creative instincts into a domain where we're seeing it in the real world. People are actually hanging out together, throwing magic spells at targets while they're also getting a little bit of a workout.
[00:03:52.615] Kent Bye: Great. So maybe you could just give a bit more context for your first encounter with either virtual reality or augmented reality, and what drew you to that medium coming in from the games industry?
[00:04:03.854] Ray Kallmeyer: Yeah, so I was aware of virtual reality for a long time, but when it was augmented reality in 2016 where I first got a chance to say this is probably something I want to spend my time doing, it was a friend of mine gave me early access to the HoloLens 1, Wave 1, and I put the device on, and almost immediately it was like a lightning bolt, and it felt like, wow, there's something really special here, where the hardware at the time had a lot to be desired in terms of field of view and weight, but at the same time, It was like getting in touch with imagination that I hadn't since I was a kid. Like every kid gets to look at a chair and see, oh, this is a Ford or it's a monster. Every adult looks at a chair and says it's a chair. And that's good because when we're driving to work on the freeway, we don't want to see cars as dragons or monsters. We need to see the world the way it is. What we lose there is imagination. And that's what augmented reality I think is really powerful in doing is returning us to a sense of presence with our imagination.
[00:04:55.748] Kent Bye: And so maybe talk a bit about what you were doing before, what you're doing now. And, you know, you said you're in 20 different cities. Talk a bit about that evolution, pivoting more into augmented reality and location-based entertainment. And so, yeah, just give me a sense of the story of how that came about.
[00:05:10.679] Ray Kallmeyer: Absolutely. So we started early on with working with brands ranging from Tesla Motors to Mercedes-Benz and Sprint and Verizon, helping them tell their stories in augmented activations at marketing events and different locations around the globe, but it was always once and done. We would help them build the thing and then it was over. So early on we realized if we could invest in a full model that included content, technology, hardware, and even how to operate it and market it, then we could start to build value that we could relicense out to consumers. And the industry that really wants what we have to sell right now, the gap is that there's cinemas and location based entertainment centers. They already spend $8 billion a year on attractions, and they're looking for something new that connects with modern audiences. And we're talking the Snap and Instagram crowd that spend a lot of time on social media, they don't have good entertainment options where they can feel like they're playing a game, but not invest 40 or 50 hours. They want something where they can play for 30 minutes or an hour. And we realized that if we could take gamified augmented reality experiences and package them in a way that we could license and sell to family entertainment centers, cinemas, and location-based entertainment centers, then we could really solve a real problem for those businesses and also provide access to consumers well ahead of them buying their own augmented reality devices, which we believe is going to happen in the next year to 10 years.
[00:06:32.847] Kent Bye: And so what kind of devices on these 20 different locations, what devices are they using there?
[00:06:37.566] Ray Kallmeyer: So the historical locations that we've got are all using HoloLens 2, that was our workhorse. We've been so excited about the Spectacles because in every way it's a more capable device. So we've started rolling out Spectacles in Chicago and other devices around the area and working right now with some more existing partners and most new partners are looking to add the Spectacles as their primary device. It's lighter, it's better rendering, it's more capable of multiplayer, fast-paced experiences, better tracking, everything about it is more exciting.
[00:07:05.555] Kent Bye: In terms of both the magic leap and the spectacles, if you have glasses, then there's certain prescription inserts. And so how do you handle negotiating or asking someone's prescription if they don't know it? There seems to be, because these devices are so close to the face and they don't really work all that well over top of the glasses, how have you been addressing that issue? It seems like a friction point in terms of making it easy for folks to come in and start to use these devices in an LBE context.
[00:07:35.695] Ray Kallmeyer: I think that's a wonderful question. So one of my earliest mentors, a guy named Zachary Stein, he's a PhD in educational philosophy. He really turned me on to the idea of universal accessibility. And that means instead of building a building and thinking about accessibility after the fact and maybe ruining the facade of your building, architect a sweeping ramp into it so that accessibility is part of the feature of the front of the building. So when we think about building user interface, it's very similar. We like building experiences which work with all different forms of accessibility requirements, be they on vision, be they mobility. We're one of the first experiences that fully support ADA compliant guests. We do color blindness and color vision adjustments for all of our experiences. When it comes to adjusting for different sites, obviously the spectacles has inserts. That creates a little bit of friction for the operator. What we find is that friction really goes away when you see the joy the guests experience when they can feel the future manifest in their glasses for the first time.
[00:08:32.560] Kent Bye: So can you talk about some of the other previous experiences that you've developed, or if this is your first experience?
[00:08:38.567] Ray Kallmeyer: Yeah, so we've got a whole body of content. Our brand really represents, I would say, a more family-friendly and accessible version of what you might expect from AR and VR, like those companies out there that have done really good with shooting zombies. That's not us. We're about getting people connected in a social context, so most of our experiences reflect that. The Unreal Garden is our largest hit to date. More than a million people have seen it now around the world. This is basically like walking through the park, the game. So if you like seeing flowers, if you like going exploring in nature, what we've done is we've been able to build that into an experience which is accessible for ages seven to 70. And we find that it's great for people going on dates, more than 50% of our users are going on a date night, and about 25% are going with their families. Other experiences we've got, are educational in nature, like Starwalk. It's like walking through the cosmos, getting to see the sun up close in front of you, or getting to explore Saturn's moons, or even seeing Alpha Centauri. It's really transformative for folks who like seeing space, like I'm a space nerd, so it's fun for me. And then we've got other experiences which are more on the kinetic side, like Sitecraft. These are the experiences really pushing what's possible in augmented reality, thanks to the spectacles. We've been able to use their multiplayer functionality to create a really fast-paced kinetic meditation game. So you can play and just throw spells at targets, and that's the basic frame of the game. It gets more difficult over time. But if you want to win the game, it gets increasingly difficult over time, so you really have to turn off your brain. That's why we call it kinetic meditation. You have to get into what people call a flow state. So that means just feeling where the targets are going to go and focusing on accuracy over speed, and that really gets you to the higher levels of the game. So you'll see that here at that the people are getting the high scores are the people that are channeling their inner Jedi and just feeling the targets and going for it.
[00:10:23.379] Kent Bye: Nice. And Unreal Garden, was that in San Francisco at the Mission Center? I think I saw that with Leela was showing it back in 2018 or so. Was that the same experience?
[00:10:34.548] Ray Kallmeyer: The very same. So the first Unreal Garden was launched as a pop-up on Market Street in San Francisco in 2018. It had a big, beautiful custom physical build-out and a big, beautiful augmented reality build-out as well. We took the augmented reality portion and extended it far beyond what you saw back in 2018 Now it's a three-act experience that spans about an hour long with a lot more depth and narrative richness than probably what you saw before. So if you've seen it previously, I highly recommend coming and checking it out again at one of our experience centers. The closest one to here is Palm Springs, but we're opening up a new one in San Diego next month. And like I said, there's more than a dozen in the U.S. and 20 worldwide.
[00:11:11.567] Kent Bye: Okay. And so this Psycraft experience where you're essentially having four people here. It's like a motion of throwing a dart, but instead of a dart, it's like launching a spell, like a little orb that has got an arc. So you kind of have to arc these things where you're trying to hit these targets that are coming up. And so it's a wave shooter in some sense where you have different rounds. And so as I was playing, there were four other people, and I noticed that sometimes I threw a spell and it hit another person. I was like, oh, wow, I didn't realize that. the people are including it and so sometimes it looked like they were also hitting those targets and so it's more of like there's a certain amount of targets that you have to hit as an individual and other people can also hit those targets but and if they hit them then it becomes more of a rather than a cooperation it's more of a competition because if they hit the target first then you may not hit your quota and you may be out is that the basic survival of the fittest type of like whoever can continue to hit the most targets as they go on then they can continue to play for
[00:12:11.547] Ray Kallmeyer: Yeah, I'm really impressed you picked up on all that nuance in your first playthrough, but yeah, you hit the nail on the head. There's elements of cooperation and competition. The analogy I like to point to is bicycling, competitive. There'll be teams of bicyclists that work with each other to help draft and get a higher speed, but only one of them eventually wins. Psycraft is similar, where there's some mechanics which encourage you to work together. You actually even get a combo boost if your teammates are doing well. So you don't want to hurt their score. You yourself get a combo boost if you never miss. So you can actually ask a teammate to help you not miss if you feel like you're going to. They can null one of your shots if it's still in the air. You can actually save someone. So you can help each other get a higher score, and at the same time, eventually, the rounds get so hard that you're not going to have enough time to get all your targets. So eventually, you're going to be in a competition mode where you've got to get the targets before them. And balancing these two back and forth creates really interesting, fun, dynamic gameplay.
[00:13:04.039] Kent Bye: So it's a competitive co-op in some ways. You're context switching between, depending on the situation. There's also a ghost, and so is there, like, one person gets the points from the ghost, or do you need all the people, like, what's the story with the ghosts?
[00:13:16.291] Ray Kallmeyer: Yeah, so when the ghost appears, everyone should immediately start trying to get the ghost, but it's only the person who gets the last shot in that actually gets the ghost benefit. It's kind of like the star in Mario. When you get the ghost benefit, you can throw as many shots you want, you will not reset your common multiplier, and it freezes your time. So it can save you if you're almost out of a round. So whenever you see it, you definitely want to get it. And everyone really needs to go for it before the time's up to make sure you get the ghost before it disappears.
[00:13:39.187] Kent Bye: Okay, and so there are like floating yellow ones with the snap ghost and there's like different colors like the greens would appear and disappear, the red would often be further away so it's more of like the long shot that you have to perfect like being able to hit it from a longer distance and so Are there any other mechanical differences between, like, the green is, like, disappearing and reappearing and the reds are further away and the yellows are kind of moving around? Are there any other, like, implications for, like, if there are more competitive or co-op dimensions to each of those or, like, yeah, if there's any other mechanics behind each of these that are trying to encourage unique emergent social dynamics between the players?
[00:14:17.304] Ray Kallmeyer: We should riff on game design. I'm really impressed with you picking up all this stuff. So yeah, the red targets are stationary. They give you the least points. So when they're up close, they're easy to keep your combo count going up. And by the way, one of the core mechanics is if you never miss, your combo count keeps increasing by each shot you don't miss. So it's really important to be accurate. If the red targets are far away, we'll encourage you to throw, but you have to be really confident you're going to hit, otherwise you'll ruin your combo count. The green targets will blink in and out. So if you first see one, you don't want to shoot it because you don't know how long it's there. What you want to do is keep an ear out for when it shows up and know it to be available for eight seconds. So those are strategically important. This is all about situational awareness training. When you first see a green target, remember it and come back to it when you know it's going to be there again. Don't shoot immediately. Wait till it turns on. and then the yellow targets, those are moving. So these are practicing your kind of innate ability to match target with speed. And the best way to approach it when you're playing by yourself is, you know, plan out a good shot path. But when you're with someone else, you shoot behind them and they shoot behind you. So channel your inner Navy SEAL and get into group think mode where you're not thinking. You don't want to be going after the same targets because then you'll compete and you'll lose your combo count. What you want to do instead is cover the whole area like Navy SEALs would. So if there's two people, you're basically 180 to 180. If there's four people, you're 90 degrees each. And that can be very dynamic and emergent. And as you're going, other people are also rotating too.
[00:15:35.233] Kent Bye: Well, it very much feels like a prisoner's dilemma where if everybody is cooperating, then that works. But if someone is suddenly trying to be competitive and deliberately get you out, then you can kind of have people that are breaking out of the prisoner's dilemma and trying to win everything else. But that may cause everybody to lose. But, yeah, I'm just curious if you've thought around those different types of prisoner dilemma dynamics that may be inherent to a project like this. Yeah.
[00:15:58.411] Ray Kallmeyer: Absolutely. Like, as you said, everyone's a friend until you've only got 10 seconds left in your round. And at that point, hopefully one person will give it up. You can actually communicate to other folks. Hey, I need to get 10 targets. And then they can, you know, pull back kind of like in baseball. You say, I got it. You can actually use your voice to communicate. But when things get crazy, sometimes they get crazy. And that leads to some fun.
[00:16:18.024] Kent Bye: It also feels like a good group experience for people to play against each other and to maybe go in and come out and also kind of dip in. And so one of the challenges with LBE is knowing what the runtime is. And this is a type of experience that could be widely varying between people who go in and get out fairly quickly for people who go in and stay for a long, long, long time. So just curious how you balance the expected gameplay length for people as they're playing an experience like this.
[00:16:43.504] Ray Kallmeyer: Absolutely. I would point to Tetris as a game where effectively infinite gameplay, but it gets harder and harder. And what that allows you to do is get an average play time over 500 players or 1,000 players. So we know that the average play time here is four minutes. And we design the gameplay around that. Now granted, if someone on our team who's played it 40 times plays, they're going to play for 10 minutes because they know it's really good. And they know all the nuance of how to get the targets every single time. But your average player at an LB location, they're going to play for about four minutes.
[00:17:08.905] Kent Bye: OK, great. So what's next as you look towards the consumer launch of Spectacles? It sounds like even before the consumer launch, you were already using it within a consumer context with the location-based entertainment. So just curious to hear where you're taking all this here in the future.
[00:17:22.321] Ray Kallmeyer: Yeah, totally. So we're going to keep growing in all of our location-based entertainment locations like cinemas and family entertainment centers. Very recently, because of the spectacles, we've been able to start licensing to adventure parks, outdoor adventure parks. So we have our first pilot at the Forge Adventure Parks in the Chicagoland area in Lamont. It went incredibly well. We're going to be moving to three locations in the next three months there. And there's 800 outdoor adventure parks in the US, which all want something that is interactive but outdoors. And really, augmented reality is the only solution that makes sense. Very excited for that.
[00:17:53.679] Kent Bye: And because it's average four-minute length time, how has navigating the overall more constrained battery, you just have enough waves of different headsets that you're rotating in? I'm just curious how that has been trying to navigate, keeping all these headsets charged as you have people floating in and out.
[00:18:09.645] Ray Kallmeyer: It's funny. When we first started, we tried to overthink it and manage battery life like it was our job. And what we ended up doing is just creating a simple round-robin system and doing the math of how many glasses we needed, and that works like a charm. So we don't even think about battery life anymore. We just make sure we have enough headsets or glasses to support the demand.
[00:18:25.658] Kent Bye: So round-robin meaning like when they first put on a headset, it's like fully charged? That whenever it's done, they just charge it up and then when it's ready to come in?
[00:18:32.932] Ray Kallmeyer: Yeah, to get to where we are now took a lot of data science, but the steps in between were like, let's do a snapshot. We'll have continuous use, nonstop players for 90 minutes. Afterwards, we'll look at all the spectacles and see what the battery life is. Oh, they're all above 90%. Great. We can now extrapolate this to having a full day's worth of runtime with this many devices. So we've got complex models which allow us to figure out how many devices we need for a certain amount of throughput over a certain amount of time.
[00:18:56.175] Kent Bye: OK, awesome. Great. Well, it sounds like you're well on your way of having a vibrant and successful location-based augmented reality business. So yeah, I guess as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what you think the ultimate potential for augmented reality and LBE and AR might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:19:13.854] Ray Kallmeyer: Yeah, that's a wonderful question. What we're most excited about is really bridging the gap between location-based and in-home gaming. I think that's a huge untapped potential for the future of augmented reality. The idea that you can practice something at home solo and then go into a location to play with your friends, I think that's the future of gaming. I think we're going to see real-world esports where people are practicing in their garages, in their homes, in their backyards. and then going to dedicated centers with curated play spaces. And we're going to see a whole birth of new, amazing titles that really activate people physically and extend all the well-loved kind of physical sports we've seen in the real world.
[00:19:50.220] Kent Bye: Anything else left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:19:53.701] Ray Kallmeyer: Check out the spectacles. They're incredible. They do everything that you want them to do. And the last thing I'll end on, and I'll die on this soapbox, is that immersion comes from suspense of disbelief, not field of view.
[00:20:05.782] Kent Bye: Yeah, I noticed that actually I think just to follow on that is that there is a certain amount of the situation awareness where you almost have to turn your body so you've kind of integrated a part of the limited field of view as a part of the gameplay mechanic where it's forcing the user to move around and the targets are good enough so that it did kind of feel like a part of like even though I'm not seeing as much as my... field is, it was still immersive enough in a way that it didn't matter as much because I was totally immersed into the experience. So it feels like you've hit a real sweet spot there. So I don't know if you have any other comments on designing around that limitation, because I feel like you did a really great job at that.
[00:20:41.112] Ray Kallmeyer: Yeah, so what we realized early on was that when we break immersion, we break the suspensive belief, it's usually not because we don't see something, it's because we can see only part of something. So as narrative designers in spatial media, what's really important is that we think about the vignetting of the content, what fits naturally within the field of view, no matter how big the field of view is. And the worst thing you want to do is show half of something. Make sure that you create gameplay that shows the whole thing when you're trying to look at it, and then make intuitive mechanics to guide the player's attention and focus to the areas that you want it to be. Then you don't have that suspense and disbelief. Then you look at your gaze as being a mouse or as a cursor in the experience, and people intuitively get it.
[00:21:19.730] Kent Bye: Awesome. Makes total sense. And I think you did a beautiful job here of pulling it all together and had a lot of fun playing through and looking forward to see where you take it all here in the future. So, yeah, Raymond, thanks again for joining me here on the podcast to share a little bit more about your journey into this space of location-based augmented reality. And, yeah, really excited to see where you take this in the future and that you're already out there having an LBE AR business with Spectacle. So it's great to hear that. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast.
[00:21:45.438] Ray Kallmeyer: Thank you so much. And if you're interested in getting a verse in one of your locations in LB, we dock licensing with businesses all over the world.
[00:21:52.924] Kent Bye: 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.
