Sandbox VR, the location-based VR
attraction, will be opening up to third-party developers soon, as the company
will be releasing an SDK for its Sandbox ‘holodeck’ VR attraction platform. Sandbox
operates a number of VR locations in major cities across North America as well
as Hong Kong, Singapore, Macau, and Jakarta. Combining both branded content
such as its Star Trek: Discovery experience and in-house developed games,
Sandbox offers its experiences in 20-minute gameplay chunks for around $40 per
person, accommodating up to six people per session. The company says in a blog
post that anyone with the know-how will soon be able to develop new VR
experiences for its location-based attractions using its upcoming SDK.
Sandbox’s locations make use of a
few technologies that developers likely don’t have, such as the company’s
haptic guns and its multi-camera motion capture system. Sandbox says however
that developers can create using more modest setups such as an Oculus Rift or
HTC Vive. Since professional motion capture can cost thousands of dollars, Beck
says the company’s framework is going to abstract away that component and put
in placeholders so you can still build for VR without these expensive systems,
with full confidence that things will translate correctly when deployed to our
full-body motion-captured holodeck. Furthermore, the upcoming networking framework
will make it possible to create a mocked-up, multi-user development environment
for testing and building experiences.
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