Hero Zone: Where Social VR Meets Real-World Revenue -
LEXRA has published the agenda for its inaugural Summit, a conference day at Gilley’s Dallas on Monday, October 5, 2026. The conference day is capped at 150 attendees. The Marketplace demo day follows on Tuesday, October 6. The association rescheduled the event to Dallas earlier this year.
The morning covers how venues generate revenue: benchmarks, marketing, and the go-to-market stack. The afternoon covers what venues offer: how operators pick content, and on what terms.
Registration opens at 8:00. Bob Cooney opens the program at 9:00 with a short framing session, followed at 9:10 by an ecosystem map of location-based XR. At 9:30, a fishbowl titled “Benchmarking: What Does Success Look Like?” puts experienced operators in a conversation about the KPIs of a healthy venue business.
Two sessions on the venue GTM stack fill the rest of the morning, both run as reverse panels. Part 1, “Filling the Calendar,” runs at 10:30 and covers awareness and conversion. The agenda copy names customer acquisition cost as the biggest operational lever between profit and loss. Part 2, “Retention and LTV,” follows at 11:30 and covers the platforms and practices operators use to upsell, cross-sell and drive repeat visitation.
The afternoon opens at 1:30 with a panel on licensed versus public-domain IP. Jonathan Casson of Sony Pictures, Neville Spiteri of Wevr and Antoine Lieutaud of Eclipso sit on the panel. On the licensed side, Zero Latency‘s Jumanji: The Lost Levels opens December 4 alongside Sony’s next film. On the public-domain side, Eclipso’s immersive Titanic exhibitions pay no royalties upstream.
A short presentation on LEXRA’s Four Quadrants framework follows at 2:00, segmenting the audiences venues can reach across dayparts. At 2:15, a second fishbowl, “How to Evaluate Content,” has operators walk through decisions they have made. The criteria: what they looked for, how an experience fit their existing audience or attracted a new one, revenue share, start-up cost, and operational complexity.
In a fishbowl, a small group with deep experience talks a topic through openly, with no scripts and no slides. One seat stays empty. Any attendee can take it, join the conversation, then step out for the next person.
In a reverse panel, the audience opens the session, raising the questions and problems they are working on while the panelists listen. In the second half, the panelists respond to what they heard, so every answer traces back to something raised from the seats.
Trading Places, the 90-minute workshop that closes the day at 3:15, is a negotiation game. One content deal, ten tables, and nobody negotiates from their own side of the business: operators sit down as developers, developers as operators. Every table works the same licensing deal for the same free-roam title. Every participant holds a card carrying another company’s constraints, from burn rate to payback window to investor expectations. After ninety minutes, the cards turn face up, and the room discusses the terms every table reached.
“Startups live or die on product-market fit. Venues live or die on content-market fit,” said Bob Cooney, a VR consultant and executive director of LEXRA, the trade association for location-based XR, author of Real Money from Virtual Reality. “The morning gives operators the go-to-market machinery to fill a venue. The afternoon gives them a framework for picking content that fits the guests they have and the guests they want. They leave having argued the numbers themselves.” Cooney publishes The VR Collective.
Every attendee receives the Summit playbook after the event, a working guide distilled from the day’s numbers, strategies and tactics.
LEXRA said it will announce additional speakers in the coming days. The full schedule is on the Summit agenda page.
The Marketplace runs Tuesday, October 6 from 9:00 to 5:00, with location-based XR attractions live on the floor. Some of the newest experience demos will be on display including some North American premiers.
“One of the biggest challenges the industry faces is a lack of understanding among the ecosystem’s various constituents. The Summit brings them all together to have the hard discussions in the open, so we can write the playbook for success together,” said Cooney.
When is the LEXRA Summit 2026? Monday, October 5, 2026 at Gilley’s Dallas, with the Marketplace demo day following on Tuesday, October 6 from 9:00 to 5:00.
What is on the LEXRA Summit agenda? A single-track day. The morning: a benchmarking fishbowl and two reverse panels on the venue GTM stack. The afternoon: an IP panel, LEXRA’s Four Quadrants framework, a content-evaluation fishbowl and the Trading Places negotiation workshop.
What is the Trading Places session at the LEXRA Summit? A 90-minute negotiation game. Ten tables work the same content licensing deal, with operators playing developers and developers playing operators, each holding another company’s constraints. LEXRA publishes the terms every table reached.
Who is speaking at the LEXRA Summit? Confirmed so far: Jonathan Casson of Sony Pictures, Neville Spiteri of Wevr and Antoine Lieutaud of Eclipso on the IP panel. Bob Cooney opens the day. LEXRA said further speakers will be announced over the coming days.
