[Meeting with] Tom Duchêne co-designer of Octo:Gone, an ambitious and really innovative project for Octopod and its partners.

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

The Octo:Gone, like many projects in the Octopod ecosystem, was imagined during an installation at one of our clients. By being in contact with our operators, our game masters and our players, the challenges they encounter are obvious and we only want to find the perfect solution.

In this case, the idea was to design the ultimate virtual reality game space, which would meet four fundamental needs:

• Reliability, having a stable and robust solution that offers the best possible tracking quality.
• Free-roaming, to be able to offer free roaming experiences on a large gaming surface for even more immersion.
• Modularity, allowing the operator to play various games in many different spaces in a very flexible way.
• Profitability, to welcome as many players as possible in a space adapted to all types of rooms.

Octo:Gone, how does it work? Why did you make these choices?

The basis of Octo:gone is SteamVR's tracking 2.0 technology: it is since 2016 the most robust and accurate system, and it has evolved to track the position of players in a space up to 10m x 10m, unlocking at the same time the possibility to use it for free movement on a large surface.

From this, the Wanadev teams have designed and developed a suite of tools and software that allow to divide the whole area into several virtual spaces, and to automatically load the right space for each game without any action required from the operator. Obviously, this would not have been possible without the Octopod:Play and Octopod:Pod software, which were already part of the ecosystem. The technical challenges were very important, but we felt it was essential to provide our customers with a solution that was both extremely powerful and very easy to use.

How do you see Octo:Gone evolving in the future?

One of the advantages of Octo:Gone is its great modularity, which makes it a system that has many advantages today and will have even more tomorrow.

First of all, the wide variety of spaces available within a single game zone gives us the freedom to integrate the vast majority of existing and future VR arcade games from partner studios, promising an ever-growing catalog of quality free-roaming experiences. Secondly, the system has been designed as a kind of Lego set, with pieces that fit together and are all compatible with each other: we can therefore imagine installing half Octo:gones or double Octo:gones that would work in exactly the same way and would be compatible with existing experiences and even more flexible to adapt to more and more room configurations.

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

The whole philosophy of the Octo:gone is to offer a form of high-end VR entertainment that will always be superior to what people can do in their living room (even when everyone has a headset at home), while perfectly adapting to the real-life needs of operators in terms of reliability, ease of use and above all profitability.

This is the result of many years of experience and R&D, and we truly believe we have found the key to the perfect VR arcade.