Hero Zone: Where Social VR Meets Real-World Revenue -
As I continue to talk to a growing list of sponsors and international attendees, I hear a recurring theme in their questions.
“For a first year event…”
Reality check: This will be our 8th annual event.
Sure, it’s a new name, a new city, and a new date. But we’ve been doing this for almost a decade now. We have a long list of past attendees who’ve raved about the prior edition and are even more stoked about this version.
The VR Arcade and Attraction Summit educational program received a 9.4 out of 10 rating from attendees. Our entire event scored an 85 in Net Promoter, where 50 is considered “Excellent!” That makes the Summit “exceptional” and “world-class.” (Their words, not ours, but we happen to agree.)
So this ain’t our first rodeo (had to throw some Texas in there since we ARE moving to Austin.)
Exceptional; World Class
Last year’s Summit, according to Net Promoter
Glad you asked. Over 8 years of partnering with Amusement Expo in Las Vegas, every aspect of the location-based XR industry has changed dramatically.
What started as VR arcade games for family entertainment centers grew into eight attraction categories, with hundreds of experiences for every kind of LBE venue. Museums, theme parks, shopping centers, touring exhibits, zoos and aquariums, movie theaters…if you could name it, there was a VR attraction designed for it.
But the Amusement Expo wasn’t drawing those market segments. It was mostly coin-op route operators and family entertainment centers. So our audience wasn’t learning from the entire ecosystem. We needed a way to bring everyone together to cross-pollinate ideas. Because diversity leads to innovation.
IAAPA is just too big. I’ve been going since 1991, and I love it. But everything gets swallowed up by the sheer size of the show. It’s big, loud, and amazing, but it’s not the place to bring together the serious players to solve the immersive industry’s most challenging problems. And that’s what the Summit was always about.
There are plenty of conferences focused on the creative challenges of immersive and XR LBE. But without a healthy, vibrant, and growing venue footprint, there is no market for creators.
After 10 years, the challenges facing operators haven’t changed. That’s the meta-problem. The good news is, to paraphrase William Gibson in Neuromancer:
The solutions are already here, they’re just not widely distributed.
Bob Cooney, paraphrasing William Gibson
Marketing is a massive challenge: selling tickets without eating all the operating margin is stopping the industry’s growth. But AI tools offer promise. How can we build tools together to create leverage in our marketing spend?
And operating costs are escalating. I remember when a 15% royalty was considered high. Now studios are demanding 30% or more in some cases. Combined with rising rents and labor costs, margins are getting squeezed.
The good news is that hardware costs are plummeting, and there’s more content than ever to program for a broad selection of audiences and dayparts. We’re going to write the playbook for pulling this all together into a profitable business.
LBE operators have families. Amusement Expo was always during spring break, making it hard for some operators to write off the family vacation for a trip to Vegas. It also filled the same calendar slot as the Game Developer Conference. And while most of the people in the amusement industry don’t care about GDC, many VR developers do. It also butted up against South By Southwest, one of the biggest immersive tech conferences in the world; tough competition for the best speakers.
August is between all the major conferences. It’s past most family summer vacation windows, and before back-to-school takes over. And frankly, Austin in August can be hot, which means hotel and car rental prices are low. Because it’s hard to make money in this industry. Keep as much of it as you can.
Four days in a hotel conference room and convention center were soulless. For an industry that’s all about delivering immersive experiences, we want an inspiring venue. And what’s more inspiring than hosting the Summit inside an existing, working venue?
Not just any venue, but a true prototype of a downloadable theme park. VieVR and Hologram Zoo are 30,000 square feet of pure, immersive digital experiences for all ages. They’re selling out with school groups and birthday parties, pulling in busloads of seniors, and everything in between. Is it perfect? No, and that’s the beauty of it. Our host, founder, and CEO, Reva Enzminger, is looking forward to networking with you and all the other operators who are in the arena, battling for margin, sweating the P&L, while trying to deliver the best experiences the world has to offer.
The cost of exhibiting at a convention center trade show is cost-prohibitive. IAAPA can cost an exhibitor $100 per square foot, all in, for 4 days. So a 2,500-square-foot experience could cost a quarter of a million dollars.
Which means suppliers don’t show their best experiences at IAAPA or any other trade show. When it comes to XR, a video loop doesn’t cut it. So, for operators to see the best new experiences, they must fly to London, Montreal, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and New York, burning jet fuel, spending thousands of dollars, and dealing with weeks of jet lag.
At the Summit, you’ll experience more than 10,000 square feet of tracked space for free roam, and we are inviting the best experiences from around the world. Some just won awards at Cannes Immersive last week. Others are coming all the way from New Zealand and Japan. We want to make the Summit feel like a festival, so operators can experience what’s possible, and even suppliers can be inspired seeing the state of the art.
Every year, we heard loud and clear that Summit attendees wanted more networking. It was always a challenge to squeeze enough education into one room, and what was really a day-and-a-half conference schedule. Now, with three full days and plenty of space, we will offer three education tracks while still allocating almost two-thirds of the schedule to networking and demos.
The best takeaways from the Summit are always the connections. And we’re going to leverage AI to make connecting with the people you want to meet easier than ever. More on that to come later.
With three education tracks, we are designing the Summit to meet the needs of every aspect of an operator’s business. The main stage will feature mostly panel sessions with operators who have already solved part of the LBEXR puzzle. The breakouts will be hands-on with smaller working groups rolling up their sleeves to build the playbooks to profitability and scale.
We’re assembling some of the top AI experts to help you build agentic workflows that make your business 5X more efficient. So bring your laptops. And we’re bringing in the people responsible for millions of marketing budget to learn what works and what’s a waste of money and time. That means every hour there’s a hard decision to make: “Which room do I head towards?”
Of course, you can always bring your partners, staff, and even contractors. The learning over these three days will pay dividends for the next year and beyond.
So if that’s enough to convince you to come to Austin in August, then grab your Early Bird ticket right now and save some money. If you need to see more, we will start announcing speakers, sessions, and programs in June. And if you have questions and want to talk it out, just reply to this email, and I’ll send you a Calendly link for a call. If you want to be there, I want you there. Let’s make it happen.
See you in Austin,
Bob
