Hands-on: DreamPark brings the AR fun to the streets

At AWE, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to go hands-on with Dreampark, the very innovative startup that is bringing augmented reality entertainment to the streets. And I also was finally able to meet with (and interview!) Aidan Wolf, after so much time we know each other virtually. Let me tell you everything about this experience of mine…

Dreampark

Let’s start from the basics: what is Dreampark? Dreampark is a startup focused on location-based augmented reality.

You most probably know very well about location-based virtual reality companies like Zero Latency or Sandbox VR: you go to a dedicated place (like a warehouse) with your friends, the stewards give you VR headsets, and then you play together a VR game (e.g. a shooter) for 30 or 60 minutes. Now, there are companies that are experimenting with doing something similar with AR or MR: you still play with your friends in the same room, but you are not isolated and can see the reality around you.

Dreampark is doing something like the latter, but in an even more innovative way, in the sense that you don’t go to a building to have your experience, but you have it directly in the streets. Yes, you’ve read it well: in the streets. And no, they are not special closed streets, they are the real ones where all the other people are walking! So you put your headset on, see augmentations in the streets, and you play with them, hopefully not letting a truck go over you (I’m kidding, you just play on sidewalks).

How the project started

Dreampark was founded by Brent Bushnell, Aidan Wolf, and Kevin Habich. Brent Bushnell (the son of Nolan) is one of the co-founders of Two-Bit Circus, the VR entertainment center in downtown Los Angeles. I have been there a few years ago (sorry if I didn’t manage to write an article about it) and I find it to be a nice place where you can go and enjoy some nice arcade machines (some in VR, and some others not) with your friends.

Speaking with Aidan Wolf at AWE (watch the video above if you want to see my interview with him), he told me that he and Nolan were thinking about how to use mixed reality inside Two Bit Circus, and then they came to this idea that they could do a “mixed reality wonderland”, which could also be taken to other locations. Aidan said that as an AR professional, he thought in the past about creating a world-scale AR game like Pokémon Go, but then he realized that maybe it is not necessary to have such a huge project to let people enjoy AR. People could just go to a specific place to enjoy an augmented reality experience. This is even better because if the project is smaller and focused on just one location, you can focus more on the design of the experience and make it more entertaining.

How to play Dreampark

From what I’ve been told and what I’ve been able to try at AWE, I can tell you that you play Dreampark with Quest 3S headsets. The straps have been removed from the devices, so you have to keep the headset on your face using your hand: this way, there is no need for stewards to help you wear the devices, I’ve been told.

After that, you can start looking around and see the place around you with some augmentations. The augmentations represent some fun cartoonish elements, and you can interact with them. For instance, there are coins you can collect, lava that you have to avoid, and enemies that you can smash. You walk around and interact with these things, trying to perform the actions that let you collect some achievements. In the current experience, there is also a big boss somewhere. You don’t use controllers for the interactions, but you just naturally employ your hands and your body.

The game can be played by multiple people at the same time: it is meant for families to come and play together. XR is used to connect people and not to isolate them.

The look of other people

The first time I read about Dreampark, one question immediately popped into my mind: What about the other people normally walking on the streets? Don’t they look at you like a weirdo while you walk and play with an MR headset on?
Aidan jokingly answered this question by saying that you shouldn’t get many weird looks because it’s probably not even the weirdest thing happening in LA. Passers-by usually look at the players with curiosity, and this is good for the company because these curious people want to know more, and this is how they discover the experience, and probably they become players later on. So the players playing in the streets also help in getting other people to know about Dreampark.

The next steps

Currently, Dreampark is only available at the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, and only on Saturdays. The future plan is to make it expand to multiple locations: hopefully, people in different cities will want to replicate the same model. Aidan also talked about malls and such, so it doesn’t need to be fully outdoors. The games can be adapted to many locations, without even the need to have a dedicated big space, and I guess this is one of the great advantages of this solution.

They also want to develop different themes for the games. Currently, there are only two, but they want to do four or five.

Hands-on Dreampark

Dreampark through-the-lenses

As I’ve told you, one of the things I was excited about the presence of Dreampark at AWE was that I could finally try (a reduced version of) it. I’ve been given the branded Quest 3S, and I put it in front of my face to see the space around me taking life.

The idea of giving the Quest headsets without the straps is, in my opinion, good and bad, but mostly bad. It is good because it’s easy to just put the headset on by putting it close to your face, and also to remove it when you want to speak with other people. But on the other side, it is very tiresome to keep a hand constantly up to support the headset. I think it’s ok for 5 minutes, but I would never play 30 minutes this way. Even worse, we are made to have bimanual interactions, but if one hand is keeping the headset, it can’t interact with anything. I personally think this should be changed.

What was cool, instead, was seeing the AWE show floor get some life. There was this empty place where you could enjoy Dreampark, and from the outside, it just looked like a dull floor with some people walking on it. But when I put on the headset, I saw it full of colored coins, lava lakes, tanks, and other fun stuff. It was very cool.

The graphics of the experience were clearly inspired by Super Mario: there were coins, surprise boxes to be hit, some fun enemies, and so on. The style was 8-bit-ish, cartoonish, and colorful. We are talking about pretty simple graphics, but I think they were ok: the purpose of such an experience is not to make you go WOW with the graphics, but just to put you in a good mood and have fun.

And so I did: I started strolling around, collecting coins by walking over them and hitting enemies with my hands and my feet. It was cool that somehow the system was detecting even if I was kicking the enemies. Hitting the surprise boxes usually freed some other coins I could collect. There was also an enemy inside a tank, and I could go inside the tank and punch it to make it fly away. It was nice and fun. The only problem is that in the AWE demo, there was no purpose, so after a while I was collecting coins and punching enemies, I started wondering “Ok… but why am I doing this?”.

Luckily, in the official experience, some achievements keep you engaged for more time.

Regarding the looks of the people, I don’t fully agree with what Aiden said. Since the experience was in passthrough MR, I could see the people looking at me. On one side, it was cool being at the center of the attention, while on the other side, having some weird looks from some attendees of the event was not great. And I was at AWE, which is a “safe zone” to do weird XR stuff. I think that if I did this in the streets, I would get even weirder looks. Plus, as Aiden said, California prides itself on being a place where weird stuff happens, so people walking with XR headsets on may still be ok, but I can’t imagine wearing this in the streets of a medium-sized city in Southern Italy. In the best-case scenario, every person is going to stop you and ask you what the hell you are doing… with some grandpa asking you why you don’t find a girlfriend instead of wasting your time with a headset 😀

Final impressions

I came out with a positive opinion about Dreampark: it is an innovative concept that aims at bringing AR/MR fun to every location in the world. It exploits the fact that in MR, you don’t need a dedicated amusement park anymore: every place can become your amusement park! This is a very powerful concept.

The experience I tried was fun and lightweight. It was also easy to learn and was ideal to be played by people of all ages. Plus, it can be played in multiplayer, so I can imagine families having fun with it.

I see a lot of potential, but being a new concept, I also think it needs a lot of fine-tuning. The gameplay should be improved to make it more meaningful, and the graphics should be polished a bit. Also, the idea of keeping the headsets with your hands is not great, in my opinion. Not to mention the fact that it can be a bit embarrassing walking in the streets with a headset on, with all the people looking at you. And that probably in some countries it may be a safety concern to make people walk on the streets with headsets on their faces. Probably there should be the opportunity to play it also in dedicated (and so safer) places.

Anyway, all the innovations require some work to make them perfect. If there were already all the answers, there wouldn’t be innovations in the first place. I think Dreampark is proposing something new, and I will be very happy to follow its developments in the next years, and I think you should do that, too.

Further references

If you want to get to know more about DreamPark refer to its official website or read this very well-written article about it on VentureBeat.

(Header image by DreamPark)

Related