SynthesisVR 3.4 and October Newsletter
As we are getting closer to the end of one very extensive October and we would like to recap on what has happened. SynthesisVR 3.4 is out We added a static desktop timer functionality (turn it on from the desktop settings). During the VR sessions, the timer would stay on top of all your games, helping the spectators and people waiting in line to know when the station is going to be free. As usual, some code optimizations are in place, keeping Synthesis up-to-date with the latest SteamVR changes. The SynthesisVR desktop border is now hidden when playing videos in the “Idle Playback” mode. Along with that, the initial setup of the “Idle Playback” mode got much more intuitive We managed to add better shutdown detection, which gets rid of the email alerts when abnormal usage is detected. Addressed issues with the latest AMD drivers. Head to our download page and update today. The new SynthesisVR web administration interface takes preference over the legacy one. The old one would remain available for at least few more months, for all of you who got used to it. However, our advise is to switch, as the new interface offers a wide range of extras: You can easily change the game for multiple stations at once. You can take a single VR station out of a multi-station session, This is vital during extending a session for certain members of the group. Wider NFC integration – you can assign customers with a quick tap of a NFC card (a standalone NFC reader app would be released before the end of October) Take a look in “Your Games” – a new games administration page. Thanks to the new advanced filters, you can easily find games missing on specific stations or games that you no longer use, but that takes unnecessary SSD space :). Helps concentrate on fine tuning your offerings. A new scheduling logic is now in place for partitioned Free Roam installations. Better menus – the system administration became much more organized. Subscribe for our YouTube channel, highlighting key administration functionalities: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFotz447dZmL2ilIMAZURrA/playlists Stay tuned for a lot more cool stuff coming out of our lab. We also got some new games for you: The Great C – a perfection in cinematic VR experience. Karnage Chronicles – now with multiplayer support, great for arcades. V-Racer Hoverbike – fast-paced racing competition in VR. Creed: Rise to Glory Arcade – Train. Fight. Win. Humble Pie – Throw pies at the most powerful man on earth. The Haunted Graveyard – another great experience, in tact with Halloween. Shortly after the release, the developers brought great improvements. Take a look on the full update notes. Mad Factory – A fast-paced, and infinitely replayable VR experience, Mad Factory is five minutes of frantic fun for everyone. Holopoint – another well known title arrived on SynthesisVR. Big Breezy Boat – a simplified and more arcade-friendly version of VR Regatta. Even better – BBB is on a $10/lifetime license. DoodleVR – the first VR pictionary game. Great games are in work – don’t forget to regularly check our games catalog! Mad Factory has been created specifically for VR Arcades. It is a fun, visually delightful, and highly replayable 5 minutes of intuitive gameplay with a ticking clock. Set in a retro-future world where you bake and frost cookies, Mad Factory is uniquely positioned to appeal to a wide audience of players – from newcomers to more experienced gamers seeking to score high on the leaderboard. So don’t miss out on this highly addictive and polished game! We are delighted to list few notable game updates: We have got a good feedback about the game and we passed that to the VR studio. The result – a game update bringing significant improvements. Unlock them by following the instructions – https://steamcommunity.com/gid/103582791462402480/announcements/detail/1705066227224796778 Now: 4c/minute NEW! LEVELS OF DIFFICULTY – There are currently three levels of difficulty to choose from: VERY EASY, SUPER FUN and EXTREME. You should ALWAYS be playing on SUPER FUN or EXTREME. The easiest option is very easy and really intended for small children only and does not include powerups or several other key features. NEW! DEATH MODE – This is selected after you choose your level of difficulty. Death mode has been really popular to play with more hardcore gamers and is super addicting and fun to play . If your score drops below the threshold, or if you have 3 collisions you can not complete the level. NEW! BONUS LEVEL – When you select DJ Johnny ‘Beast’ song and choose your level of difficulty, you will see a new Bonus level has been added above Extreme in the menu. This level is fast-paced and super extreme. TIPS & TRICKS: ADJUST SFX – You can adjust the SFX feedback levels from inside the Hotel Transylvania lobby or by pressing pause mid-game. If you set them too high it does become distracting (FYI) Please have a look at the manual HERE on page #14. OBSTACLES – When you are playing, you will see these large pink rotating walls. You must get your head and controller thru them without touching any lasers. Your feet/body doesn’t matter just get your head and popstic/wands through. GREEN POWERUP – When you hit a green powerup (green orb), you can blast thru obstacles by quickly pushing your Popstic/Wands forward right before the obstacle. Link to updated game instructions here: http://bit.ly/PlayHotelTransylvaniaPopstic The team behind Electronauts was very generous letting us all use such AAA experience for free. With the upcoming multiplayer update, starting from November, the game no longer would be free for commercial use.
Commercial Licensing
2016 – An unforgettable year where the landscape of reality became virtual. An year where it began with virtual reality dedicated arcades, a new industry even Nostradamus couldn’t have predicted let alone Google. Everyone jumped in and naturally we took the dive as well. During the early stages, there were not too many content for VR. The content developers were looking at Arcades with suspicion in terms of licensing their content. The arcades were finding it difficult to come to a price point to attract customers, the customers were trying to wrap their head around what is VR? Everything was a big unknown. Through all this confusion there was one thing that was certain, VR is cool and it is here to STAY. Slowly with the proliferation of arcades and the push from big players in VR, developers started emerging with great VR content and coming to terms with commercially licensing their content, there was a realization among LBEVRs, Arcades and Developers, the need to co-exist in an ecosystem, which is important for the industry to thrive. 2017 – The big questions were, what sort of experiences to offer? how much to pay for licenses? finding the right price point? Educating the customers in VR?, and the developers were having a hard time wrapping their heads on how to price their content. Do they collect a one time fee, monthly or usage. How to track the time? etc. Fast forward to 2018, there has been quite a lot of development in this and we believe in creating an ecosystem that helps arcades and developers thrive. Consumers have also gained considerable knowledge about virtual reality and are seeking out this form of entertainment. With the proliferation of arcades all over the world, the developer community has embraced this surprisingly new development. At Synthesis VR we have been thinking on how we can make the existing license model even better, a solution that can truly help arcades and developers and provide the best experience for consumers. We had to take into account that arcades are popping up not just in North America and western Europe but everywhere in the world. Places like Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand, Hungary and various other places where it would be impossible for an arcade to pay the same price as arcades in the USA. We came up with the obvious solution and introduced our Fair Rates Plan in early May 2018. The developers now have the ability to set different rates for different regions, this helps everyone in three ways: Developers are able to monetize in regions where they couldn’t possible monetize before Arcades in these regions are able to commercially license games and offer the latest updates to consumers Reduce Piracy and illegal usage As developers and arcades have geared towards the PPM model (pay per minute), At Synthesis VR we wanted to do more. Our commercial licensing platform is tailored to provide a solution that can be feasible and flexible, hence we also introduced the fixed monthly fee model as well as the PPM model. We didn’t stop here – in July 2018 we introduced the Floating License Plan. An ingenious way to license games combining pay per usage and fixed monthly fees. With our state of the art tracking and analytics we found arcades that use this model, profits have increased by 32%. A model that tracks the concurrent usage of the gaming stations and then calculates according to their licensing model. At Synthesis VR we are at the forefront of introducing new features, creating an ecosystem that helps arcades and developers thrive in this fledgling but exciting industry.
The Great C – a Cinematic experience for your arcade
The Great C – now available for licensing on Synthesis Renowned sci-fi author Philip K. Dick became known for his odd, and often twisted narratives which covered near-future and themes that became popular in cyberpunk. One of his short stories, The Great C, has been adapted into virtual reality (VR) and will premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The Great C short VR film is described as a cinematic VR narrative, which takes the viewer to a post-apocalyptic future where the remnants of humanity are ruled over by an all-powerful computer known a The Great C. The story of The Great C concerns a young woman called Clare, who lives in a village under the control of the almighty computer. Each year, the village is forced to send a young person on a pilgrimage to appease the machine. Clare finds herself faced with a bitter choice when her fiancé is chosen for the pilgrimage and she must choose whether to accept the brutal rules of her society, or try and fight back. The story has been adapted into VR by Entertainment One’s studio Secret Location, who are trying to use The Great C as a test bed for pushing the boundaries in VR editing, composition and structure. “Philip K. Dick’s wonderfully forward-thinking stories have always felt primed for telling in equally forward-thinking mediums. Secret Location is highly focused on ushering in the future of storytelling, so pairing The Great C‘s provocative themes with our VR development prowess is helping us redefine how we consume sci-fi stories,” said Ryan Andal, President and Co-Founder of Secret Location. “Authors have long adhered to the ‘show, don’t tell’ technique. We’re hard-pressed to find a better way to ‘show’ a story than in VR – adapting Philip K. Dick’s The Great C only makes our ability to ‘show’ even stronger.” We are proud to announce Synthesis VR is partnering with this renowned author to offer this masterpiece to all the arcades and location based entertainment centers.
SynthesisVR 3.2
Hi Fellow Arcade Owners, It’s been 2 months since SynthesisVR 3.1 was released. As version 3.2 (beta) is coming out next week, we are happy to give you a sneak peek of what to expect. Improvements and bug fixes: After 2 days of poor performance by our hosting provider back in May and after they didn’t succeed in convincing us the issue is permanently resolved, we switched to Amazon. The migration was well coordinated and none of our customers experienced any downtime. And now 2 months later we are enjoying 100% uptime. In addition, we set multiple monitoring tools and are ready to scale our resources up as they are needed. We addressed a case where the VR Menu Mirror may hang the desktop app. Fixed a random case of slower internet causing games not to launch when done at the start of VR session. Improved support for time zones having 30-minute and 45-minute offsets. Optimized detection of changed private IPs within your LAN network. Optimized detection of issues within your private network (usually related to WiFi installations) SynthesisVR is proud to be the only platform providing true licensing capabilities. Next to the already existing progressive billing, we have added: Free test keys – as our catalog is about to go beyond 100 titles, having to license every game in order to try it can become tedious. Now it’s possible to obtain test keys and see what you would get. If you don’t think the game would work well with your setup and customers, you don’t have to license it. Fixed fee and PPM options – Often you have to select between fixed fee and the pay per minute licensing models. Due to this, you are very likely to end up with multiple accounts. Floating licenses – the “holy grail” of the commercial licenses. On SynthesisVR, you can obtain both a fixed fee and PPM licenses for the same game. If you don’t like your PPM licensing bill, now you can cut it in half by combining Fixed Fee and PPM licensing. Country based rates – one size doesn’t fit all and we know that. If you are operating in a country with a lower GDP, it won’t be profitable to pay the same licensing fees as te USA (for example). SynthesisVR is your only escape from joining the gray market. Marketing materials – we did the hard work to maintain a big library of high quality images and videos. Enjoy! New management interface Two years after we started SynthesisVR, it’s time for a new and more modern management interface. There is still a little more “polishing” to be done, but it’s already available for everyone who wants to use it. With 3.2, we are getting closer to a complete self-service solution. More billing options We always been proud that SynthesisVR is the only platform that have true support for multiple VR attractions. Room scale, free roam, racing simulators, treadmills, PSVR.. just name it. We’ve always been proud that SynthesisVR is the only platform that has true support for multiple VR attractions. Room scale, free roam, racing simulators, treadmills, PSVR… you name it, we already can do it. However, we’ve never thought we were done, and we continue to find areas of growth. Have you ever struggled with how exactly to bill a father for his time in your racing rig and his 2 kids in Rec Room? With version 3.2, you can take advantage of our new “balance limit” functionality. Just charge their account $100 and let them all play with the appropriate amounts being deducted from the balance. You may also get that guy who wants to try all your offers. Just add in a balance for him and let him play whatever he wants deducting from that balance as he goes. If you are concerned this is going to interfere with your online reservations – please don’t, we have you covered! New web widget Sell membership cards online and have SynthesisVR to automatically renew the subscriptions. As usual – it is 100% customizable. More customization options And still, we know that one size doesn’t fit all. With version 3.2 we pass on a challenge to all web developers to overwrite the default SynthesisVR 2D menu and build your own on the top of the SynthesisVR APIs. Are you a Unity developer? Great! We encourage you to take our scripts and APIs and do something amazing! Once again, THANK YOU for being such an awesome community! If you’ve never tried SynthesisVR before or you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at info@synthesisvr.com
Games on Focus – May 2018
Hi Fellow Arcade Owners, Finding the best games for your arcade isn’t either easy nor fast. Considering different genres, we chose and are happily presenting you some of your best options: Kiss or Kill Welcome to Kiss or Kill: Trivia Royale, the ultimate trivia showdown! The social VR game show is filled with big choices and crazy shenanigans. 2-8 players must answer fast-paced questions in an intense trivia battle! Designed for VR arcades with local and global multiplayer Tens of thousands of questions Mini games in between rounds Tournament mode allows for easy rematches AFFECTED: The Manor! Oculus described AFFECTED: The Manor as the original VR horror experience, now it’s available for commercial licensing under SynthesisVR! Commended as one of the best VR experiences to date and with over 250 million views on YouTube, it has been the highest rated experience since its release on the Oculus store. It’s simple one-button controls and high quality VR environment makes AFFECTED: The Manor the perfect app to show newcomers and experienced gamers alike. AFFECTED: The Manor is a horror walkthrough that only takes approximately 15 minutes to complete. With 2 routes to choose from and multiple endings…can you make it through! Arrowborn Arrowborn brings you the fast-paced and visceral action of a multiplayer first-person shooter and combines it with the immersive experience of virtual reality archery. Show your lethal accuracy and clever map tactics as you load your quiver full of deadly magical arrows and lay waste to the competition! Select from an ever-expanding assortment of magical arrows each with their own unique way of wreaking havoc on your opponents and giving you the advantage. Attach a powerful gem to your armor to increase your survivability or boost your mana pool to unleash deadly barrages! Cosmic Trip You’ve been deployed on an alien planet full of hostile enemies. You must defend yourself by building and commanding an army of cosmo bots to gather resources and destroy the opposition. Built from the ground up for VR, Cosmic Trip lets you experience real-time strategy like never before. Feel what it’s like to destroy alien enemies using futuristic weapons. Strategically build swarms of badass robots to defend yourself and gather materials. SynthesisVR supports the arcade mode for Cosmic Trip Sovient Lunapark VR Treat yourself to an array of thrilling VR-attractions! Contemplate the magnificent creations of Dr. Pavlov! Immerse yourself into the brilliantly crafted world of walking and thinking machines and abominable cadavers hungry for the flesh of the living! Stroll through the facility in single player mode or compete with other visitors in the arena. Based on extensive feedback provided by SynthesisVR, the game would be optimized for VR Arcades. Vacate The Room | Vacate 2 Rooms Can you find your way out of the different rooms? You need to find a lot of hidden items. Uncover secrets. Use strange mechanisms to proceed through the different rooms to the exit.
SynthesisVR 3.1
Hi Fellow Arcade Owners, Along with all the excitement with the SynthesisVR 3.0 release, we also received great requests for new functionalities and business models. Thank you for being such an awesome community! What is new in SynthesisVR 3.1: Save games: We removed the required initial setup for the game progress functionality (also refereed as “save game per customer”). The functionality now works automatically with any deployment. Classic arcade billing: At SynthesisVR, we do not follow the trends – we creates them. It is with great pleasure that we announce the support for the classic arcade business model. As of version 3.1, you are able to run sessions that are not fixed in duration, but runs as long as a game is running. The first supported title is the legendary Space Pirate Trainer. As example, you can charge $8 for a single SPT game or $20 for 3 credits. To give this even more meaning, you can have “Thursday Open Doors” from 4pm to 10pm (as usual, it is you who sets the rules) and let your customers play as long as they can (yes – SynthesisVR would offer fixed monthly fee for SPT). Scoreboards: Just run your sessions with actual customers instead as “Guest sessions” and SynthesisVR would take care and collect the scores for you. All that would come as a beautiful widget for your website (some final touches still pending). The scoreboard widgets supports all session models (time based / classic / other upcoming models). Game variations: Now you can create “custom” games based on the games installed on your VR stations. To give you an example, the “Longbow” game is the most popular one among all the games included in “The Lab”. You can create a new game variant named “Longbow” and set it to directly start the Longbow game. This would save your operators some time explaining to your customers what they should initially do. Looking for more cool functionalities? We have a lot planned for SynthesisVR 3.2, so stay tuned !
SynthesisVR Version 3.0
Hi Fellow Arcade Owners, It’s TIME TO CHANGE! As the out-of-home VR entertainments constantly gain more and more popularity, there are number of new solutions that aims to solve one or another issue. Usually, you would end up with a multitude of solutions such as: games launcher booking system waiver service discount solution(s) As arcade owners, with your resourcefulness you would make all this work until the moment you have internet or server issues (ring a bell!) and then you realize you are in a heap of mess trapped in piles of unproductivity. Don’t let some unfinished software dictate how you would be doing your own business. Use SynthesisVR – the only arcade management solution built based on actual business needs. Now, we have some exciting news to share with you – SynthesisVR 3.0 now enters into a public beta and is already live in few of our early partnering arcades! What’s new: We listened to you and got rid of the static desktop window that was accompanying SynthesisVR since our first release. Now you can minimize and easily control all th sessions, start reservations and much. The tiny desktop configuration app is now enhanced with menu functionalities Yes – it works OFFLINE as well. Now, you can use SynthesisVR for mobile events and demos outside of your main location. NO MORE UNPRODUCTIVITY! We brought animations, trailers and games information to our 2D VR launcher. 2D launcher is a helpful tool to change games during game play, pause the game and take a look at other games. According to our survey and partners, having a 2D menu is very important as it helps switching games faster and prevents customers from exiting games by mistake. You want to change the information for a game? We’ve got you covered: It could be a pain installing new games or trying to license games on your VR stations. By licensing games through SynthesisVR, the system would take care and activate the games for you. As easy as pie! Version 3.0 is just the beginning of our primary mission – achieving 100% self-service. Before, during and after the actual VR session. No excuses! Try SynthesisVR @ VRLA 2018 or join SynthesisVR and get a free trial
Synthesis VR 2018
Hi Arcade Owners, After keeping quiet for some time, we are happy to be back with a brand new web site and a series of awesome news. In the past few months, we have been working extremely hard to polish and simplify Synthesis VR and to prove ourselves as the one-of-a-kind system. In return, we received the biggest reward we could ever dream about – your trust. It is a real pleasure to constantly work with all of your and to receive such priceless suggestions about what you guys wants to see next. We are all doing the first steps of the VR industry together and now we are sure – it is going to last! To hit in with the news, we are bringing the light back on the Synthesis VR commercial licensing platform. For the past 4 months, we became the most robust platform, providing unmatchable distribution options. You could use SynthesisVR to license games based on usage or on a fixed monthly fee. We even have few games offering lifetime license option. Adding to that, many games comes up with progressive billing, where as more you use as less you pay. This all indeed wouldn’t be possible without the help of our awesome partners – the people who create us the content that empowers all the arcades. This post wouldn’t be enough to thank everyone, but we would like to welcome our newest partner; a company that in fact is well known to all of you – Survios. After testing the platform for the past few weeks, we are more than happy to announce the following games are now available on Synthesis VR and in our opinion, you shouldn’t miss licensing them for your arcades (at least this is what we’ll do for our own VR chain): Raw Data Arcade – you all know what a top title Raw Data is, and “Raw Data Arcade” has been optimized for VR arcades Sprint Vector Arcade – soon to be another top arcade title – brings a lot of fun and competition among the arcade customers Smashbox Arena – no doubt, one of the best multiplayer games ever made Jumanji VR – now you can add a huge selling point in your catalog Stay tuned for more!
Version 2.0 Release
Version 2.0 Release Notes Hi Arcade Owners, We already shared some screenshots and videos with some of you and now, we are pleased to announce SynthesisVR Version 2.0 is ready to release! Head to the download page and try it out. Prior Version 2.0 When we started the SynthesisVR development in 2016, we knew how important would it be for our own arcade business. That is why SynthesisVR aimed for speed and flexibility. We indeed needed a launcher too, so at first, we took the obvious approach and started building one in Unity. However, the downsides quickly came out: SteamVR doesn’t let two heavy 3D applications to run at the same time. This meant, our 3D launcher wouldn’t stay in the background and being ready for further commands. By having an actively running 3D application all the time would increase our electricity consumption with ~ $10 per month It would also keep the hardware loaded and with the time, this would decrease the performance (short the lifespan of the components) The operators wouldn’t be able to perform simple tasks from the desktop, unless they uses Steam. If you ask why this is bad – as VR arcade, we provides experiences the customers cannot have at home. Showing the Steam interface does the opposite effect An unified 3D environment suitable for both room scale and sitting experiences isn’t feasible The 3D launcher is harder to rebrand with your own arcade logo So, we dropped the the idea and moved onto building the actually harder solution – a 2D environment (also called Overlay). In the end, what SynthesisVR brough in the 1.x versions is a easy to use system that addresses all the mention issues and let us integrate whatever functionalities are needed. As example, the Voice Chat wouldn’t be possible if we were stick with a complete Unity based solution. So, what changed? Despite SynthesisVR became the most mature solution and our popularity increased, many of you still needed a 3D environment to be able to easier catch the customers attention. It has been an year since we decided to move ahead with the 2D option, so the time to reconsider our decision has come. Despite all the mention downsides are still valid, there is one significant difference that let us integrate a 3D environment in the right way – SynthesisVR’s core is still that tiny 2D application running in your PC tasks, so the 3D environment doesn’t have to perform tasks it isn’t intented for. So, as our company name hints – version 2.0 is the perfect synthesis between 2D and 3D environments and it addresses all the listed problems. The video below is a raw (unedited) OBS capture: raw OBS capture Keeping to our ideology that SynthesisVR has to be 100% customizable, v2.0 introduces a new “locale” functionality that lets you change all the texts in the 3D environment. You are also free to play your own welcome video in 3D. On the top of that, now you could not only change the text-to-speech, but you are free to record and play your own audio files instead. At the time of the official release, you would receive a detail documentation on how to do that. And the best part – this is just the first of many 3D environments we would be releasing. We aimed for an environment that is relaxing and welcoming for people of all genres and ages. Aiming for more environments wouldn’t sacrifice the flexibility – you would be able to use different environment for any of your VR stations. Stay tunned with our further updates by following us on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Get in touch now at info@synthesisvr.com.
Commercial Game Licensing
Commercial VR Licenses – A partnership that counts! When we first launched VR Territory in June 2016, as a dedicated arcade for virtual reality, we were among the selected few. Virtual Reality was a cool, but fledgling tech novelty and not embraced by the mass market. At that time, the content available for arcades were very few. Another big drawback, there wasn’t a single management software dedicated to virtual reality arcades. Hence, Synthesis VR (SVR) was born – an arcade management and game automation system with many features like voice chat, mixed reality, game tracking and many more. We listened to our customers, and over a period of time kept enhancing SVR, and very soon other Arcades started using SVR for all their needs. Fast forward to September 2017, while the general public’s awareness of VR has jumped dramatically, VR technology and content have evolved greatly and sales of VR Headsets have grown steadily, these dynamics have not yet resulted in VR capturing the mass market, a big factor is the increasing skepticism due to its slow adoption in-home. Surprisingly VR has seen a phenomena in the growth of Out-of-Home VR adoption namely arcades dedicated to virtual reality like VR Territory. Given our experience working with VR Studios and Arcades, we decided to take SVR to the next level. We are now introducing the SynthesisVR licensing platform. Unlike everything similar, SVR is the first to “unlock” a dialog between the VR arcades and the VR studios. How SynthesisVR makes the difference: Multi faced licensing solutions – The VR arcades no longer have to join multiple platforms to obtain the license type that best suits them. SVR not only allows licenses based on fixed monthly fees or usage, but unlocks a whole new set of functionalities. Daily licenses ; annual licenses or lifetime – it is as simple as you are hoping for. You would love our progressive and “best fit” billing models. Strong Reporting – You can track all the processes and keep the control of your spending. Support & Customer Service – You can count on us all the time! The first titles would be revealed in October! To join SynthesisVR as an arcade or to distribute your content on the platform, just shoot us an email at info@synthesisvr.com.