VR escape rooms from Pixar and Oculus alumni can help you escape, for a little while

I was a hamster. My friend was a rabbit. We met in a laboratory. We waved our hands and squeaked and danced. This was a Wednesday afternoon at 3 p.m. Grocery deliveries and follow-up emails.

An evil but funny doctor followed us. I was small and could hide in tunnels. My rabbit friend (CNET Senior Reporter Joan E. Solsman) was bigger. We blew things up, stepped on triggers to open ways to solve puzzles, and tried to open doors with secret codes.

This little VR distraction was an escape room moderated by an actor who played the role of moderator, villain, and general companion. They appeared to us as a comic dog, a robot villain with a television screen and a disembodied voice. Adventure Labs looks and feels like a cartoon or a casual video game. In VR on one Oculus QuestIt feels more like a collaborative experience. And for a while I forgot my real world.

With closed real theater rooms, Virtual ones are becoming more and more convincingand are on the rise with actors who are more available than ever to work from home. The challenge is to figure out how to turn them into ticket experiences.

Adventure labs is a new company founded by veterans from Pixar and Oculus Story Studios who want to experience live escape room experiences in VR that are bought like ticket events. President Kim Adams and CEO Maxwell Planck have worked in animation and VR storytelling for years.

The new app would like to create independent VR-based escape room events in a sense like a real VR experience with a ticket The nothing, Which tapped Marvel and Star Wars and Disney films. The Void and other physical entertainment rooms were during the Corona virus Curfew. Even if companies continue to open up, it can take some time for immersive attractions to figure out how to work safely. A home VR escape room immediately makes sense here, provided you have the equipment.

Adventure Labs’ idea uses live actor presenters who guide the story and have a script to improvise that embodies various comic-like avatars that can speak to the players. The hosts share the revenue, says Kim Adams. The first live actor Adventure Labs used was an immersive theater actor, but others start without VR experience.

The actors were trained remotely by Jennine Willet, a founder of New York’s Immersive Theater Company, during the shelter-in-place Third railway projects – who developed some of the most memorable theater experiences I’ve tried in the past five years – and author of the first escape room experience we tried, Dr. Crumbs School for Disobedient Pets. If you’d like to see our highlight video (which came out a little faulty), see below.

Animal escapes

Four people can register for an Adventure Labs experience. There were only two of us – it’s hard to find friends with VR – but we found it perfectly fine for two.

We had about 40 minutes, divided into about 10 minute challenges, where we solved puzzles and helped each other. Our host helped us when we needed it, encouraged us, kept us busy as villains, or just entertained us.

Similar to a theater or VR experience, we were greeted by the host in a waiting room, told the story of our upcoming challenge and then led to training. Each of the four animals has special powers and can enter the rooms differently. I could crawl into tiny rooms.

We tried Adventure Labs on an Oculus Quest, but it also works on Windows PC VR headsets. It is on SteamVR and the Oculus Store. When you buy a visit, a code is sent that is entered into the app and sends you to a specific room for your players and a host.

After getting used to our controls – which sometimes felt like wearing gloves – we learned how to put on flame throwers, hit gloves, and tools to build blocks. Joan and I yelled at each other around the room to do things, and it felt pretty funny. But it wasn’t as expensive as other escape rooms I’ve tried in the real world, and it felt like everything was going to end a little earlier than I wanted.

However, this is very expensive

We had fun Yes, definitely. It’s better than being in the real world, unpacking grocery deliveries, watching the kids, and checking the changes in the stories. It was cool as long as it lasted. However, the cost of adventure labs is more difficult to accept. We tried a free demo, but room bookings typically cost $ 100 for four people. This corresponds to some real escape rooms, but is much more expensive than an average VR app. I can’t imagine paying for it, especially when so many other VR experiences cost less. Maybe $ 20 for an individual experience … but Adventure Labs is currently getting one person to buy the entire package for four people instead of being compared to others for solo cards. (The company offers a discount code, OG LAB COUNCIL, for 50% off, but even then that’s $ 50 for an entire booking.)

That is my biggest concern here. I can imagine many VR rooms where fun can take place at fixed costs and which can be carried out again and again. There are escape room-like single games, like The VR roomthat cost less, or multiplayer games galore (like the free beta for Echo VR). However, they may not be as personally curated as Adventure Labs or set up for four friends.

There are other ways to fix an escape room. For platforms like Zoom: One, which I recently tried out from an experienced escape room company, many virtual escape rooms are created Puzzle breakLet my family solve puzzles about sharing Google Drive and sharing a screen, and a host who stayed with us to help. The cost of these experiences is similar (Puzzle Break also costs $ 100 for four people), but at least it’s easier to get people without VR headsets to join – all you need is a laptop. With Adventure Labs, the hundreds of dollars for a VR headset become part of the entry fee.

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I would love to have experimental spaces where friends and co-workers can set up their own spaces, be a dungeon master for virtual worlds and improvise adventures together. “After all, we want to build all of these building blocks so that other adventurers can join in,” says Maxwell Planck. “When we have our feet under us, we want to expand. We want to gain adventurers with whom we work closely. We want it to be a bit more curated and structured,” says Planck compared to open social worlds with functions for private spaces such as Altspace VR or VRChat.

Adventure Labs is not yet the open door for experimental projects, but it’s another step to explore how actors and actors could overlap in VR. Maybe future projects in a puzzle lab will be a little stranger than cartoon rabbits.