Like this holiday season of rebirth and renewal, the stuttering industry of virtual reality, or what I like to call more inclusively immersive entertainment, has been making its way back to sustainability, with new venues, technologies and experiences, and stabilizing (if less sexy) business opportunities in the enterprise in such areas as job training, design and manufacturing.

Dreamscape Immersive storefront entrance at Westfield Century City Mall in Los Angeles(Photo by David Bloom)
Vaughn’s 25 years creating theme-park rides as a Disney Imagineer paid off with a visitor experience that begins in the lobby, continues through a lounging area with faux artifacts from two of the VR experiences and segues gently into the suit-up area before the actual show begins. All three experiences on offer are more story oriented than the arcade-style first-person shooters and music games common at other location-based entertainment sites.
For $20, you and up to five others can spend about 15 minutes in an otherworldly zoo, deep underwater or in an ancient tomb. It’s way too soon to tell whether Dreamscape’s approach will succeed, but it does check off a lot of boxes in the list of factors that can build success, including providing a range of unique experiences and smartly managing throughput.

Former astronaut Buzz Aldrin as a hologram from 8i, dropped into a Martian landscape(Image courtesy of 8i)
At 8i, I even took part in a brief volumetric capture, lasting just a few seconds. That brief capture still generated enough three-dimensional video data that it took a number of hours to render a 23-second clip of me standing, waving and gesturing. But the potential for a wide variety of uses in enterprises, entertainment, video gaming, messaging and much else is already evident.

Think:Floyd EXP performs at Wisdome, an “immersive art park” in Los Angeles(Photo by David Bloom)
Think:Floyd’s performance also featured overhead images from the dome’s 12 projectors. It’s a surprisingly immersive and consuming experience, even if the band should have placed itself in the center of the room, rather than off to one side, because the real attraction was looking skyward as the band played. For those interested, Samskara and Think:Floyd will be playing again this weekend at the Wisdome, providing a very different kind of immersive entertainment option for a very different crowd.