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Leisure Insight – The Need to Innovate

Leisure Insight - The Need to Innovate 1
Matt Wells, CEO of Frontgrid

Experiences you can’t have at home

VR is at a tipping point. Though the number of home headsets (and therefore home audience) globally remains proportionately low, more and more people have tried VR and it is becoming more mainstream.

Looking forward to the future, with VR you can build anything and experience it anywhere. Why would you bother to leave your house? LBE as an industry needs to continue to offer people good reason to open their front door and spend their leisure time at their venues.

At Frontgrid, which combines motion-based-engineering and immersive content, we can see some clear opportunities for differentiation and a growing trend and demand for unique, immersive experiences.

Leisure Insight - The Need to Innovate 2
Paradrop VR, Frontgrid Fly Niagara

Give people a reason to interact

The biggest draw for all of us to get out is arguably to meet other people. When you play a game at home, even if it is multiplayer, the truth is, you are generally on your own and it is somewhat of an isolating experience.

LBE venues offer the irreplaceable benefit of social interaction and competitive socialising is a continuing to grow trend and opportunity.
From a VR perspective, capitalising on this means offering multiplayer experiences and the chance for people to see each other and experience something new in VR. There they can collect points, earn awards and achievements and compete against each other in competitive leagues. These can be anything from small group competitions in a similar way that people go out bowling, to wider e-sports leagues, with a longer tail driven by building a community around the game and incentivising repeat play.

Content relevant experiences

Venues need to offer experiences that have not been done to death. Shooting zombies for the sake of it may have had its heyday.
Considering what content is most relevant and poignant to your LBE venue, its audience and where it is located opens up more exciting and profitable possibilities.

Perhaps your venue is located near a famous sports stadium or golf course. Perhaps it is by a tall tower with an iconic city view. Or what we have found to be particularly high impact, an iconic natural landscape or tourist destination. VR has so much scope to enable people to explore and learn about nearby places differently.

There is also the potential to bring cultural experiences to LBEs, such as art exhibitions or museum archives. Or maybe the chain of LBE venues wants to create its own story and narrative to be known by.

Creating custom-made-content, relevant to your venue and audience creates a further draw to the attraction and raises the perceived value of the experience – and therefore the potential ticket price chargeable.

Appeal to all the senses

Whilst the mind is a funny thing and VR can trick it into thinking it is anywhere. The body still has something to say about it.

Another point of differentiation that LBEs can still own over experiences at home, is to offer multi-sensory experiences.

Combining VR with physical elements such as movement, provided by motion-based engineering, can make the experience feel more real.

There is still mileage in the “wobbly chair” VR arcade game; however venues need to keep an eye on more sophisticated self-steer and interactive technology as well as engineering platforms which offer a more sensitive simulation of the various forms of exploration, from driving to flight.

There is also the potential to layer on further sensory add-ons, such as blowing air – which emphasises movement.

Consider the whole customer journey

For bigger immersive experiences, there is also the opportunity to add wider theatre for the senses, from sound to scent and temperature adjustments.

However big your installation, make sure you think about the whole customer journey, to elongate and enhance the experience. Consider what people receive before their experience, what is going on around your installation and what do you want people to do next after it.

Don’t just shove your VR experience into a dark corner and expect people to notice it. Make it stand out and create some theatre around it.

Direct links to brand experience and retail

When judging the ROI of your VR installation, there is the revenue collected from the paying to play the game of course. But you also need to consider what footfall it draws and what incremental revenue it drives, not just from the experience itself, but from food and beverage and other activities around it.

LBE is becoming increasingly important as a tool to pull footfall back to bricks and mortar retail outlets, offering people experiences that they can’t have at home. And yet most often the entertainment and the retail are separate entities.

Whilst there are some good examples of retail brands dabbling in VR, there is still a wealth of opportunity and first mover advantage to be gained by adopting it as part of the overarching omni-channel marketing of brands and products.

With a VR entertainment experience, the main benefit is you have someone’s attention captured, so you have the chance to create a deep level of engagement with your brand positioning. And as you are already speaking to them in a digital space, send them on to the next step towards purchase or behaviour change, by collecting their email address so you can continue talking to them, getting them to follow you on social media, or better still incorporate direct links to e-commerce and therefore the bottom line – sales.

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