It was mid-morning in America’s Dairyland when I killed my first zombie of the day.
Over the next 15 minutes I would take down a couple hundred more, working up a decent sweat in the process. When I was finished, the next group of six players filed in after me, each one paying $25 a head for the privilege.
This is The Arena, one of the very first commercial installations of Zero Latency Virtual Reality in the United States. It’s a full-body, untethered, free roaming VR system and one of the first of its kind to be deployed commercially.
Thanks to the bold initiative of the Kalahari Resorts, who carved out space for the facility here in the Wisconsin Dells and at a similar location in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, it’s now part of the great American summer vacation. After spending a day with it, I’m pretty impressed.
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HANGING OUT YOUR SHINGLE
Kalahari Resorts is well known for elaborate waterparks, and the facility at the Wisconsin Dells is no exception. It’s the main attraction.
But guests leaving one of the hotel’s 750 rooms to reach that waterpark have to walk right past the massive, floor-to-ceiling viewing wall outside The Arena. People end up gathered there gawking almost all day long.
That’s where staff are waiting to interpret what they’re seeing. Up on the wall is a live feed from inside The Arena. On one screen is the view of the players in-game, and on the other a view of them moving around in real life. A complete Zero Latency rig (minus the silly plastic horn) is sitting on display nearby.
During my visit, it’s the games of Outbreak that drew the biggest crowds.
“That’s what everybody seems to gravitate toward,” said Zero Latency’s Bob Cooney. “Their first experience is this. And everybody loves to shoot zombies, so it’s natural to build a zombie game in VR. But we’re really proud of our other game because we think it shows what’s possible.”
That other experience is called Engineerium.
“When our team was building it,” Cooney said, “they were thinking about things like how to create joy. How do you create wonder? How do you create awe? How do you create the other emotions besides fear in virtual reality?”
In Engineerium there are no guns. Players move through a virtual space populated by flying whales and stingrays, moving from node to node in order to alter the world around them and unlock new pathways. It is movement itself that becomes the challenge. Players are asked to walk around the outside of a sphere, down a winding helix and across a chasm of floating tiles. The experience left me feeling giddy and, because it was completely untethered, not the least bit motion sick.
While magical, it did feel somewhat incomplete. Outbreak left me exhausted, but Engineerium left me wanting more.
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Source: Polygon