Hello, fellow Operators!

thenexusvr

Every Vive Pro I have messed with has been a piece of garbage. Perhaps they got better in the last month or so, but I tried 4 of them in my arcade and all had massive tracking issues where the gen 1 Vives had none. The most recent problem has been audio issues with getting the audio to actually play in the Pro headphones. Personally, I am holding out for the rumored Valve HMDs that I have been hearing about. Those guys have a solid track record with hardware and will probably knock it out of the park when they release their headset. Also, I am excited to see what Oculus does in the next year or so as a next gen Rift after the Quest comes out. I'm still offering mostly Vive stations, but I have pretty much given up on HTC putting out anything halfway decent or reasonably priced. I'm dropping HTC entirely ASAP.

Spectrum_Waylon

thenexusvr

Are you using the new lighthouse 2.0s with the vive pros or the previous gen?

thenexusvr

Spectrum_Waylon

@Spectrum_Waylon I haven't had a chance to test out the 2.0's since they aren't available yet outside of the insanely priced Enterprise package.

jwoodall

Howdy y'all, I'm James Woodall, one of the co-store managers at Lucid VRcade in SW Ohio (Dayton area). We'll soon be running 14 booths in a 2,765 sqft storefront location. I say 'soon' as we launched a bit before we got our full set of Vives and are installing as the weeks go forward (we're at 10/14 at the moment and the last 4 Vive Pros landed today). We're using Vive Pro Business Editions with the Lighthouse 2.0s and suspended wires (as well as some after-market 'upgrades' to make the whole experience more hygienic and comfortable). Recently we finished getting all our machines running on the same LAN so we can do local matches in our VR experiences. We're trying to get our wireless modules up and running as well but we keep running into tracking and bandwidth drop issues here and there -- we think it might be a result of our walls being built with metal studs and the drywall mounted on those studs not being thick enough to fully block the Wireless Module's signal.

As far as we're aware, this VRcade is the largest (as far as number of booths) in the Midwest region of the United States. Most of the people in this area of the United States seem mostly unaware of VR beyond the occasional Google Cardboard and GearVR experience. Our only real local competition is from a 10-booth side-show at a large indoor amusement center aimed mainly at kids whose VR is presently undermarketed and not well-cared-for nor is, we suspect, operating legally.

Being an ex-game developer, I've been thinking hard about how to get our weekdays up and was considering offering VR workshops where we team up with local games development studios to show folks how to make games and in particular how to build VR experiences. I'm hoping to catch the ear of the local school boards and maybe even arrange for virtual schooltrips thanks to the new Titanic and Apollo 11 experiences. Has anyone else had success with that so far? If so, how did you propose the idea to the schoolboards as that's my main hangup at this time.

Anyway, we're ramping up quickly with our customer base. In only a month's time we're almost hitting profit margin on the weekends thanks to adjusting our payment models after reading the SpringboardVR whitepaper. We keep seeing groups of 4-7 coming in through the doors so we're very happy that we decided to start 'pre-expanded' with our 14 booths. We're excited to see what the future holds for VR and, myself being a tech enthusiast, I'm hoping to stay on the cutting edge as new technology in the VR space emerges so you'll probably see me dropping my thoughts from time to time on various emerging or prototyped technologies that I feel might be critical to really nail the 'holodeck experience' I'm hoping to provide one day at our VRcade.

Spectrum_Waylon

thenexusvr

I was just wondering as the 2.0s seem to have more issues with reflective surfaces. Are you wireless or tethered?

thenexusvr

Spectrum_Waylon

Haven't tried the wireless modules yet. Just tethered.

jwoodall

Spectrum_Waylon

When you say 'reflective surfaces' in regards to the 2.0s do you mean acoustically reflective or luminously (light) reflective?

Spectrum_Waylon

thenexusvr

Gotcha, I have no idea why the tracking is so bad then! Sorry I couldn't be much help! We are working on replacing our pros for regular units as well

thenexusvr

Spectrum_Waylon

The tracking has been better lately. I bought 4 Pros and returned 3 of them. I kept one to test at my home office. All my tests there have been fine lately with the tracking. The current issue has been the audio. For some reason the audio will not go through the headset regardless of the settings on the computer. It always only comes out of the desktop speakers.

Spectrum_Waylon

jwoodall

Light Reflective, we never had a big issue with reflective surfaces even though one of our rooms has windows until we used the new 2.0 lighthouses and vive pro.

jwoodall

Spectrum_Waylon

Strange. I've got a bunch of 2.0s in various ambient light amounts (we have a large open-glass store front so the booths in front have a little more ambient light than the ones in back which don't get hardly any) in semi-rectangular booths and they're all working pretty well after we told them to assign themselves new networkIDs so that there weren't conflicts between the headsets more than a Vive Pro occassionally 'finding' another lighthouse.

Our booths are 9-foot tall, non-ceiling attached, walls with an open doorway that's covered by a draped fabric and we've nothing but Vive Pros and 2.0 lighthouses installed (minus our one wireless unit). The lighthouses are installed on the walls and about half a foot underneath their lip, so they can't see each other. The space in our booths is about 8.5ft x 10ft. The floor is gym mat-covered polished&sealed concrete and the ceiling is an acoustic ceiling tile grid interrupted occasionally by fire sprinklers.

Does that sound similar to your setup?

thenexusvr

jwoodall

This is an image of one of our room scale stations. The others are identical. When testing the Vive Pros back in the week just after they were released we had massive tracking issues and juttering that we didn't see from the gen 1 Vive's on the same setup. I have not tested them in the arcade lately. Like I said, I have had good results with the tracking in the last couple months on my home office setup, but there always seems to be something wrong with the Pro anytime I plug it in. Right now it is the audio. I don't want to offer it in my arcade until I can get a consistent result out of the device. At this point I am just holding out for what Valve has planned rather than waiting an eternity for HTC to become anything resembling a well run or sensible company.

colincentrevr

Hi All,

We open in 3 weeks with our bigger location and will be trying to get 15 Vive Pros in a large 18m x 18m room with no dividers initially. Not expecting to succeed but giving it a try. Back up plans a plenty lol. Currently we have 6 x pro's running in a 12m x 7m room (2 rows of 3) with a shop window at one end and 4 65" TVs in sight of them and after a lot of careful trial and error tracking set up in the first few days, we have had no tracking issues. WE have occasional audio glitches almost always cured by a reset of the link box, and 4 cables have had to be replaced. They have a hard life though, almost completely fully booked at weekends from 11am to 11pm and gentle use throughout the week except in the holidays when its busier than the weekends every day. Parties are selling like crazy too. We are going to try wireless in the bigger place, but we will only run Tower Tag in our small place soon which really doesnt need wireless. I will let you all know how we get on.

VR-ARRIVAL

Hi All. Andrew Lyttle here. A newbie in this field - opened our store in Perth Australia just before xmas using (originally) 7 Vive Pros with wireless adapters in a relatively open plan setting. Nothing but problems for the first week requiring significant troubleshooting of the issues as we went. We have actually gone back to 6 stations (when we added another set of Ver2.0 BS for the other system, everything went to hell). We have also gone back to 4 cabled and 2 HTC wireless adapters and have been troubleshooting the wireless to try to give the same experience as the cabled ones. I have added some posts in the topics on base-stations and wireless adapters on this group. We have come to the conclusion that to get the 7th station up and running, we will need to put in a drywall to limit the base station interference. Colin - if you are running the stations all in a row, you might have some success but if you have a row on each side of the store, I think you are going to struggle. My background previously is actually in sports science, working with elite athletes. Having said that, we were always working a lot with technology so it is not a huge step to running a VR centre. The goal for us is to definitely expand into the vocation/training/educational spheres and I understand that SpringboardVR are supposed to be releasing an Educational content stream (as early as this month they told me at the end of last year) but haven't heard anything else from them on this.

thenexusvr

VR-ARRIVAL

We started with the philosophy of defined stations for each and every headset except for the Omni Treadmills. That has worked really well for us. I like the look of open concepts with several stations in a single open area, but I have heard a lot of woes from people doing that setup that we have simply not had to deal with. People seem to love the fact that they have their own space in our arcade. Especially when we have multiple groups in the arcade and wanting their own separate areas. We use Discord for chat between the stations and can set up whatever stations we want to interact with each other and keep the others on their own. The stations are not completely closed off. They each have three walls, with the open side toward the middle of the common area of the arcade. This allows for spectators, but also gives us the advantage of zero interference between stations. I added an image of one of our stations for reference. I wish they could have been bigger. I wanted 10x10 but our location would only allow us to do 8x9 to maximize our profit per square foot. It has work out AMAZINGLY so far with very few problems.

FNSArcade

I'm the head Technician and Network Admin for Fun N Stuff, we just opened a VR section at our location with 3 Stations. Currently still testing the waters with different games and ideas. I'm an avid gamer myself and I built our VR machines.

We also had trouble with reflective surfaces in our areas with the 2.0 trackers as well. I'm currently using 4 trackers/lighthouses to cover 1 large room with 3 stations in it. We are also using the wireless system which is proving to be alittle annoying but quite interesting as well.

KatePlayItVR

Hey everyone!

My partner Mike Creedon and I opened our arcade 3 weeks ago in York, UK. We are one of about 6 in the north of England - it's a pretty new concept here.

We have 6 stations using gen 1 vibes, all with the same software available on. We are fortunate to have had free local press coverage, and are waiting for word of mouth to spread. In the 3 weeks we're already starting to see things pick up and most people booking 60 minute slots rather than 30. We have group bookings into July for kids birthday parties, as were the new thing to do.

I suspect our biggest hurdle is going to be space. We are operating six stations, reception area and customer seating area from about 88m² / 950 sq ft. Because of this we can't offer much in terms of food or drink or as any other things for customers to do.

We have a glass fronted shop on a road at traffic lights, which is great to advertise to stopping cars. We're opposite a small street full of shops, including bakeries, dominos, and subway - so we invite groups to bring in their own food and drink at the moment.

CCVR

Hey guys.. thought I would share our setup.. we use blackout blinds on a wire system.. we close the curtains we need which let's us have some open space or intimate areas.. we had crazy tracking issues trying to get this to work but runs fine now... anyway happy to help anyone who may be looking at this type of setup

Cheers Jason CCVR.com.au

thenexusvr

CCVR

Where did you end up putting the basestations in order to make that setup work? Is is all HTC Vives or do you have some Occulus or WMR in there, as well?

CCVR

thenexusvr

Hey ...

We ended placing both vive 1 base stations at the rear of the space both facing toward the TV.. I used the synch cable and had to position them heaps of times to get them right. But they work fine with only very few drop outs from losing tracking.. and this is more to do with the position of the base stations...was an absolute pain to get to work but we are there now and do nothing but turn the PCs on each day and the occasional room setup... let me know at studio@ccvr.com.au if you want me to send some photos Cheers Jason

KatePlayItVR

CCVR

Hi Jason,

That looks awesome! We have recently just started having some headset tracking issues. Although we did have to put up partitions down the middle of the room due to interference... My other half Mike is the IT man, and I think I'm going to direct him to this post as it may well be that you might have some awesome advice that could help us fix the issues we're getting.