Join LEXRA. The Location-based XR Association to help grow your business.
Last week Meta came out with guidance for experience developers on the Quest, advising them to design for sessions that fit in the 20-40 minute range, which they called the Goldilocks Zone. This is the first time I’ve seen them acknowledge the elephant in the room. They’re finally admitting that comfort and friction are issues. And until they have time to address them with lighter-weight, more comfortable headsets that work more seamlessly, they are asking developers to design within those constraints.
Anyone who has used VR knows that it takes way too long to start a session. Between dead batteries, firmware, software, game, and controller updates, and the long list of menus to navigate, it’s all tiresome. And then you have to set up the boundaries, every…single…time. I once wanted to give a demo of Richie’s Plank to a friend who had never tried VR. By the time I got everything running, she had time to take a shower, dry her hair, get dressed, and eat a sandwich.
So, for a brief experience, perhaps 5 or 10 minutes, that onboarding friction isn’t worth it. Papa bear says make it last longer.
I am shocked at how hard it seems to make a headset that doesn’t hurt your face after half an hour. I thought for sure that Apple would figure it out. Nope. I find the cushion on the Vive Focus 3 to be pretty comfy, but at about 40 minutes, even that hurts.
The BoboVR strap for Quest and Pico certainly help. Balancing the weight between the front and back, and adding more overhead strap support contribute to longer wearability. But unless you’re The Weekend, your face is still gonna hurt after 40 minutes. Mama Bear says “Take that thing off!”
According to Meta, the ideal length of experience for VR is between 20 and 40 minutes. Not too short, not too long…just right.
Meta writes in their blog to developers, “In general, we recommend building VR games that are optimized for the 20-40 minute “Goldilocks” zone so users don’t need to choose between quitting in the middle of something or pushing themselves past their comfort levels.” Some interesting insights from their research can inform the location-based VR market.
Meta’s research found that sessions lasting less than 15-20 minutes are less enjoyable than longer sessions. Games with significant onboarding reduce perceived value. Getting players into and out of the experience quickly and efficiently will increase their enjoyment. I know when I got to Sandbox VR and have to strap shit to my feet and hands, it isn’t adding to my experience. Conversely, Hero Zone’s Hangout makes onboarding fun! As soon as I am in the headset, I am playing with stuff waiting for the others to join the session.
On the other end of the spectrum, Meta said that sessions longer than 40 minutes “don’t add enjoyment.” They cite physical comfort, motion sickness, social isolation, and battery life limitations. But is that true?
When this story hit LinkedIn this week, I saw that Mighty Coconut, the developers of Walkabout Mini Golf, one of the most popular titles on Quest, posted that their average session is 2+ hours! I was curious about the other hit social game for kids, Gorilla Tag. Sources suggest that the average Goriila Tag session is over an hour. So if two of the most popular VR games average sessions over an hour, how can 30 minutes be the “Goldilocks Zone?”
Walkabout Mini Golf and Gorilla Tag have one crucial thing in common. They’re both social multiplayer games. Most people play Walkabout with friends online. And Gorilla Tag is all about social interaction. When people play together, they play longer. And we all need to play together more often. Courtesy of Hartmann Capital
Gorilla Tag introduces another key element that can significantly enhance the VR experience – embodiment. Players swing their arms to move around, kind of like a gorilla. It makes movement feel natural, which makes players more comfortable.
Free roam VR is the ultimate embodied, social VR experience. You’re in a room with other people, moving your body in the space. It creates a deep level of immersion, increasing the perceived value of the experience.
My first free-roam VR experience was at Zero Latency in Melbourne in 2016. It was a 45-minute epic experience. At the end, I was exhausted but enthralled. It costs $88 and was worth every penny. Zero Latency was selling out sessions six weeks in advance back then. Now, throughput was limited, and times were different. But I’ve always maintained that for free-roam VR, we can push the envelope towards longer experiences.
Most free-roam game experiences are still in that 15-30 minute range. But more and more VR arcade operators running Hero Zone are turning on Party Mode and selling hour-long sessions. Each game runs about 10 minutes, and players come back to the Hangout to vote on their next game. It’s a ten-minute loop that can be repeated 4 or 5 times in an hour.
Large-scale free-roam storytelling experiences, such as Horizons of Khufu from Excurio, are approximately 45 minutes long. And new experiences from Wevr, Univrse, and Fever are all pushing up to that 45-minute mark. Because of their massive throughput and space efficiency, they can keep a lid on prices to remain accessible to wide audiences.
So while Meta wrestles with how to make consumer VR good enough to grow the market, we’ve already cracked that code in LBE. After a decade, we’ve solved many of the problems, but we haven’t widely distributed the answers yet. That’s why I started LEXRA – the location-based entertainment XR association. Founding memberships open next week. You can pre-register at www.lexra.org.
If you’re not in our Circle Community yet, this is your last chance to get in as a legacy member for free. Even if you don’t join LEXRA, you’ll keep lifetime access to many of the community spaces. As soon as we launch the LEXRA memberships, new community signups will be restricted to paid members only. You can join for free at this link.
