Virtual reality may not yet be a mainstay in your average home, but that doesn’t mean VR is limping. People are still putting on headsets and entering fantastic worlds—they’re just doing it at dedicated facilities, where bespoke equipment and high-end experiences have turned “location-based” VR into a moneymaking enterprise. And no one has led that charge more than the Void, a Utah-based company that since 2016 has opened 16 locations in four countries (with another 14 countries in the works across the US and Europe).
While the Void has created a number of home-grown experiences, it’s perhaps best known for its work with ILMxLab, the wing of Disney-owned Lucasfilm dedicated to creating immersive experiences. That partnership has already spawned VR attractions set in the worlds of Star Wars and Wreck-It Ralph; starting today, it ventures into the MCU with Avengers: Damage Control. Earlier this week at the XRS Conference in San Francisco, WIRED led a conversation with with Void cofounder and chief creative officer Curtis Hickman and Vicki Dobbs Beck, ILMxLab’s executive in charge (a real title!) to discuss why Paul Rudd and Benedict Cumberbatch lent their talents to Damage Control, what people expect when they buy a ticket for high-end VR, and how best to leverage the magic of—well, magic.
WIRED: Well, let’s start off with the trailer we just saw, Avengers: Damage Control. It comes out on Friday. I thought I heard the actual Paul Rudd in there as Ant-Man, and Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange—is there voice talent from the Marvel movies? What can people expect?
Vicki Dobbs Beck: Well, I’ll let Curtis describe the actual experience, but yes, there is voice talent from the movies, and the performers that do the motion capture are also the ones from the movies. It’s not a hundred percent, but people are really excited about this new form of entertainment and were willing to participate. Damage Control is really the culmination of 10 years of the Avengers; it takes place post-Endgame, and it was an incredible opportunity to be the capstone on what’s been an absolutely phenomenal run for those characters.
Curtis Hickman: Beat for beat, here’s what happens. [Laughter] First of all, it’s the longest Void experience we’ve ever had, and so we’re very excited about that. People always come out like, “That was amazing … I want longer.” So we’ve done that. You’re going to meet Doctor Strange in his sanctum, and you’re going to feel like you’re there. I mean, that’s the great thing about immersive VR: It’s not just a visual thing that you’re partaking in. We’ve gone to great lengths to make sure that you do feel like you’re there, that when you go by a window you feel the breeze, and all the little details throughout.
So you’re going to fight your way through a new Avengers experience based off of an old foe, Ultron. You’re becoming a hero. You’re putting on this new piece of equipment that’s a blend of Stark and Wakandan tech. You’re going to go fight alongside the Avengers. Who wouldn’t want to do that?
Dobbs Beck: I think one of my favorite things about this experience is that as much as I love having a blaster or a milkshake launcher, you don’t have a prop like that. You’re actually using your hands, and it’s gesture-driven, and that was a really significant advancement from where we started. It feels like you want it to feel—the power’s coming from you and not a device, which is very cool.
This is not the first time you’ve worked together. There was Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire in 2017—I’ve actually got my Boba Fett socks on, though I don’t know if you can see them—and Ralph Breaks VR in 2018. Two years in VR is a very long time, so I want to explore the evolution of the partnership at a couple of different levels. One is from a technical standpoint. You mention that it’s longer, and Vicky mentioned that hand tracking is integral to it. But what has changed that people would notice between Secrets of the Empire and now?
Hickman: Honestly, we’ve just been trying to improve every single time we work on things. Most of you have done it, so I don’t mind being honest with friends: You go into Secrets of the Empire and hold up your hand, someone else’s hand will kind of pop up in front of you. That’s because Leap Motion wasn’t originally intended to work in a social environment like that, so it’s confusing their hand with your hand. We’ve added a layer on top of that now, so that doesn’t happen—your hand is your own hand. It sounds like a little thing, but a lot of work went into making that happen.
Dobbs Beck: The other major advancement in Avengers is the number of characters that are in the world with you at any given time—it’s many times greater than what it was in any other experience we’ve done to date. So we’re always pushing the boundaries of what’s possible technically, but we keep learning with each subsequent experience what makes a really compelling location-based endeavor, and I think it’s the learnings that maybe inform the experience as much as the evolution of the technology.
People have gotten savvier about VR since 2017. I would imagine for a lot of people, Secrets of the Empire was the very first time that they had experienced VR of any stripe; two years later they come in having seen more, having more expectations. How has feedback that you’ve gotten from users over time shaped your thinking about the experiences?
Hickman: Even before Secrets, we had Ghostbusters: Dimension—that’s where the biggest learnings came from, because it was the first time we’d ever tried it in a major public way. People go through and they come out [saying], “That was amazing!” And we’d say, “Great—what was it about?” “I don’t know. I mean, it was Stay-Puft, and we shot some stuff. But it was so good!” We wanted them to understand the story that they were part of. How can we do that? What can we learn from Imagineering and other venues that are out there?
And so that’s when we introduced this pre-video which we sometimes we call Act One or The Briefing Room. It’s literally just a giant monitor that you stare at when you go in, and it tells you two things: Here’s the story, and here’s what you’re going to do. We call it the critical thought, and we really drill it into people. I think we may have overcorrected a little bit on Secrets of the Empire—”GO FIND THAT CRATE!”—but when people came out they could describe the whole story that they were part of, so it made a really big difference.
Dobbs Beck: The three experiences we’ve collaborated on all began as films, and one of the things that we’re really trying to do is make that transition from an experience that you have in the theater to an experience that you have in VR—whether that’s in an outside location or at home—as seamless as possible. So we’re really striving for that cinematic quality, and one of the ways we got that was by involving real talent in the videos and producing them at a very high quality.
I’d like to go back to the beginning of the actual partnership if we could. What was the genesis of this?
Dobbs Beck: Curtis had gone to TED, and there was quite a bit talked about and written about after that, and it was really a match made in heaven. The Void became a part of the Disney Accelerator program; that was really the means by which we were able to engage together. We knew that on the Disney side we could bring IP and we could bring expertise in developing the digital real-time immersive experience, and certainly on the Void side they had created this extraordinary platform and had all of this magic—literally—in the design of the experience.
Hickman: I’ll never forget the first time I saw those early videos from ILMxLab of the different things they were trying out. I turned to my cofounders like, “That’s the dream, if we could work with those guys.” And it was just a fleeting thought, like, “I wish for a billion dollars,” something that’s never going to happen.
At the time, there was literally no concept of immersive LBVR, there was no such thing. No such thing as a backtop, a computer you wore on your back—there were people following other people with laptops and warehouses at Stanford, but there really wasn’t much for us to go off. So even before we made our first video that the world could see, we built a functioning prototype, which is the one we took to TED. I’ve always been glad that we did that rather than just put the video out there like, “We promise we’ll do this!”
The IP of the projects you’ve done together has all come from different houses within the larger Disney kingdom. You’ve got Marvel, you’ve got Lucasfilm/Star Wars, and you’ve got Disney Animation—and at least two of them have their own sort of vaunted story department. How did that that factor into the development of the three experiences, and what differences did you find among the three?
Dobbs Beck So in every project, we have the Void, we have ILMxLab, and we have the IP owner. In Secrets of the Empire, because ILMxLab is actually part of Lucasfilm, we were sort of two halves of a whole there. That was really helpful, because we were treading in very new territory, and so from a story and a franchise perspective, people have to get comfortable with what stories we were going to tell and how we were going to tell them in this new platform. The fact that we were literally down the hall from the story department made that much easier than it perhaps would have otherwise been.
Then, when we were doing Ralph Breaks VR, Walt Disney Feature Animation was heavily in production on the film, and the project actually came out very close to the film release. So in that case it was interesting, because while we were working with one of the writers from the actual film, and she was kind of a critical link between the film and the VR project, they were actually kind of removed from the process and really trusted us to carry forward to the spirit of what the film was and the franchise was overall—because we were actually telling something that was not a duplicative story to what was happening in the film, it was actually complementary.
You know, Marvel’s much like Lucasfilm in the fact that there’s a really comprehensive franchise strategy, because it’s such a rich world with so many characters and intersecting stories. So in that case, Dave Bushore, who is VP creative for the franchise, played the role of like executive producer and was extremely involved in the very beginning: What story are we going to tell? How do we tell it? How do we make it consistent with what they were striving to do in the Marvel universe?
Hickman: When I and my cofounders first started the Void, I made a list of laws that kept growing, so I decided to limit it to 52. It’s a deck of playing cards—four categories of 13. Creatively and practically, this is what the dream was. There’s a bunch of those; we could probably talk all day on those, as everyone at ILMxLab knows, because I won’t shut up about it. But it’s things like: You’re going to be you in the experience. The goal in the end, when you go to the Void, is that you’re going to step through this portal as if you were going into another dimension, but you’re fundamentally still you in the Void. If you want to pretend to be somebody, that’s great, but you being you is just a fundamental part of reality.
All these laws are like that. If the goal is to walk into Star Wars as if you were stepping into another room, then what sort of laws and rules do we have to pay attention to in order to make that work? Some of those have to do with wish fulfillment, like what are you gonna be doing in the new world. Some of those things are magic-related, like getting people immersed using psychology, and alief versus belief. But it’s this system of rules and laws that have sort of helped guide every Void experience and provide a bit of a track for some of the studios and people who are coming from this film world and stepping into this new medium—a bit of a direction of where the experience is going to go.
If there’s a way for me to get a deck of those cards, just tell me now and take my money. Vicki, I’m curious how that thinking, that comprehensive taxonomy of best practices or core tenets, how that’s affected ILMxLab in its immersive work outside of this particular partnership. There’s Vader Immortal with Oculus, you’ve done stuff with Magic Leap, you even worked with the director Alejandro Iñarritú on the museum piece Carne y Arena. How has Curtis and his cofounders’ thinking about this helped you develop these other properties?
Dobbs Beck: We’re always trying to tell the right story for the right platform. There’s really a very sweet spot for a Void-like experience. Because you control 100 percent of the environment, there’s things that can be done in any experience that you couldn’t do a home. Transducers in the floor so when it shakes, it feels like you’re really on a skiff moving through the air. There’s heat, there’s smells. One-to-one mapping, so when you reach out to the wall you see in the virtual world, there’s actually a physical wall there as well.
All of that sensory reinforcement really elevates this to deliver scope and scale and a social experience. One of the things that I and my team really appreciate is that when people come out of the Void, even though we gave them a mission at the beginning delivered by these high-profile actors, what they talk about when they come out is what they did together as a team. What their experience was. That is something that you just don’t get in the home experience. So I think what we’re looking at is, as we see all these wonderful things that do work in location, is to really embrace that and continue to push the boundaries of that. We’ve learned a lot from Curtis about the power of illusion, and if well-executed, how that can actually be quite transformative inside the experience itself.
It was almost three years ago that I visited the Void in Utah. At the time, there were the 4D elements that Vicki mentioned, and all of these have become sort of foundational elements of location-based VR at large, but what really felt like the crux of an entirely new experience was redirected walking, and how you made this incredibly small space feel expansive. As experience after experience has piled up, and as you are getting more and more ambitious, are there any particular new illusions that have come into play?
Hickman: I wish I could bring you all over to my lab so I could show you the crazy stuff that does not work at all—that’s almost more fun than the stuff that does, because you learn a lot either way. Redirection in space and scale and scope has been something that we’ve been really working with since the very beginning, since the very first thing we showed at TED. It was important to us to really take advantage of that powerful technique and come up with new techniques that have shaped and created the scale that you can see in these big experiences today.
Outside of the VR part, how do you think about the rest of the experience—what happens after people buy their ticket and walk in? Different location-based companies have taken different tacks, but what are your own prerequisites for building a new experience?
Hickman: We’ve learned to put our packs up front in the window, so that people can actually see people getting suited up—and more importantly getting suited down, because that’s when you’re really energized from the experience. We’ve learned that it’s really hard to explain to people what it is. It’s kind of like trying to explain to somebody what television is while you’re on the radio: “Oh, there’s these moving pictures. It’s going to be really cool.” When you come out you’re talking about the story lived, and not necessarily the one that was happening around you. It’s really hard to express all that. So we’ve learned a lot about how to make a narrative that people can come out with, and express to other people what it was they did and how fun these moments were—and trying to get people back in to see it for themselves.
Dobbs Beck: It’s really hard for people to grasp fully what is in store for them. The other advantage to working inside of the larger Disney company is the access to Imagineering—and while this is different than the considerations that they would have in the theme park world, they’ve been available to consult with throughout each process.
Since the beginning, location-based VR, and location-based immersive entertainment as a whole, has been held up as the salvation of consumer VR. Is there too much pressure being put on it?
Dobbs Beck: Location-based really has a very, very important role in the evolution of immersive entertainment more broadly, and it was really because of seeing what the Void was doing that I think we even began to appreciate that. When we first started, we thought we were going to be creating experiences primarily for the home—but as the home has taken longer to evolve as a market opportunity, the beauty of location-based was people understood it. They understood that they buy a ticket and they get to have an experience, and hopefully at the end of it they go and tell their friends and they want to experience it again. Location-based entertainment has been a gift, in that we hadn’t anticipated it being quite as robust as it was on top of everything else—because we’re not bound by home platforms and consumer specs, we could deliver an experience that was as close to cinematic quality as possible.
What are the most important things that are really integral to being able to create a lasting model for building experiences? Is it about the tech, is it about the IP, is it about having an illusionist as a cofounder? [Ed.: Hickman is also a professional illusionist.] What are the truly necessary things that you could not do this without?
Hickman: The truth is, it’s honestly this front-to-back maze of technology and story and world-building and customer relations and Imagineering and—OK, because you already mentioned it, the one thing that nobody really does, and I feel like this is one of the biggest secrets that people just don’t take seriously, is studying magic and illusion design.
There’s a book called Designing Miracles. It’s fantastic, go read it. It’s meant for magicians—see through that. When he talks about time dilation and different ways to create magic, write them down and strip them out and stick them into VR. Magic by Misdirection by Dariel Fitzkee, fantastic book. You just have to see through the stuff that’s written for magicians, but magicians are nothing more than guys that make VR without glasses. They’re creating alternate realities for people.
Dobbs Beck: It’s really important to have high-quality experiences, but the thing that makes high-quality experiences possible is actually having scale. One of the challenges for any company is how quickly can they get multiple locations—not just any location, especially if you’re trying to deliver a premium experience. One of the things that I’ve come to appreciate is, this is as much about retail, and people that are really knowledgeable about real estate and operations, as it is about the part that we love, which is the storytelling and the creative. You need both. People are forming opinions about the power and the potential of these devices right now. If it’s a great experience, then they’re more likely to eventually think it’s something that they want to do in the home, and it will become more a part of our everyday lives, instead of something we do once a year, you know, or once every couple months.
Hickman: The last thing we need is for people to be introduced to VR in a bad experience.
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