[Meeting with] Grégory Galliot, co-designer of Octo:Gone, an ambitious and innovative project for Octopod.

How was the Octo:Gone designed? What were the needs of this new space ?

With my colleague Tom, a development engineer at WanadevStudio, we were coming back from a virtual reality room installation at a client's place during which we had taken a lot of feedback. This made us want to offer a free-roaming solution with SteamVR tracking (the famous 'Base Stations 2.0').

The technological limit of this tracking doesn't allow us to do more than 10mx10m, so we can't use it for our Warehouse spaces, but a lot of experiences from the Octopod:Games catalog (mainly from partner studios) are very interesting and built around the constraints of this space. Our constraint is to offer the best catalog of experiences that can meet the different needs of our operators. By synthesizing the existing experiences and proposing a space for each one, we came to the following conclusion: we had to be able to propose several spaces in this new space. We knew that technically it was possible because we already proposed boxes in our room-scale spaces and we knew how to modify them on demand from our Octopod:Play launcher software.

So we can offer most of the experiences in the WanadevStudio catalog (Box and Room) and, following the opening of the catalog to the integration of games from partner studios this year, we can offer experiences up to 8m x 10m, 8 players in totally free movement.

Why did you think of the Octo:Gone ?

Because it's a reliable, scalable technical solution that can easily find its place in an operator's environment, with a large, varied and evolving experience catalog.

Octo:Gone, how does it work ?

The space can accommodate 8 players in 8mx10m, equipped with PC backpack and HTC Vive Pro VR headsets. Then, depending on the game chosen, our Octopod:Play launcher virtually cuts out the physical space.

For example: A group of 4 players wants to play Jumpers VR (in 8x5 -> in Half, one of the spaces of the Octo:Gone), the hardware is configured by Octopod:Play to launch the players in this space. In this configuration, there are still 4 player stations that the operator can also launch in Half, in 2 rooms or in 4 boxes. This is the advantage of the Octo:Gone: it adapts to the need.

How do you think the space will evolve in the future ?

For me it will become the reference gaming space of our offer. With the collaboration of renowned studios, the regular addition of new games (that meet our quality standards) and the Octopod:play software platform that facilitates the launching and the follow-up of games, it has everything to please!

Technically we are very much linked to SteamVR and the 'base station 2.0', if Valve ever releases an update allowing to be no longer limited to 4 base stations and 10m x 10m, who knows what the Octopod partner ecosystem could offer...!

What are the advantages of the Octo:Gone for a VR center?

• A catalog offering quality experiences;
• The possibility of having multiple configurations to easily meet the needs of customers;
• Ease of operation thanks to the Octopod environment;
• A high profitability per square meter in free movement.

Moreover, I would like to add that I am not 'the creator of Octo:Gone', it is a project born from customer feedback that found an answer in the form of Octo:Gone thanks to the technical skills VR, software, sales and marketing.