My fellow journalist Dorien Luyckx visited VR Arcades in Belgium. She made a video, interviewing Quinten Horemans, founder of BeVirtual in Ghent. The interview is in Dutch – Quinten explains that an arcade enables people to try VR, together with friends and family. The advantage is the social dimension.
For people who never did VR it is weird to see others move around frantically, but for the players who are in a virtual world it doesn’t matter. The technology is rather okay now, Quinten says, so it’s good to try it out knowing it can only get better. You can find the article on De Tijd (Dutch).
I wonder how the arcades will evolve. Even for people who have VR experience, it’s not always self-evident to have enough space to move around, especially not if they want to share the VR experience with friends and family. It’s also an opportunity to try new experiences, headsets and peripherals. So maybe they arcades will stay, even when VR becomes more mainstream.
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