With the newly opened Zero Latency VR in Sydney, we had the opportunity to sit down with CEO, Tim Ruse to discuss all things VR. Here’s how it went.

1. Congratulations On your newest Zero Latency VR venue opening in Sydney, Australia. What can you tell us about the new venue?

   Thank you! We’re excited for Sydney-siders to explore Zero Latency VR’s immersive free-roam virtual reality offering at the new Mascot venue. Zero Latency VR takes what you might be familiar with from consumer grade VR, to a larger, untethered scale. Up to eight friends, families, or colleagues will wear a VR headset, strap into a backpack and use a controller to interact with each other in a 200 square metre space, physically walking around the space to engage with the virtual world they’re experiencing. We believe this is the next step in virtual reality, and we’re glad to have Sydney join our other venues in Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and the Gold Coast!

   We currently have two experiences available at the Sydney venue, Undead Arena, will see you and your friends participating in a game show during a zombie apocalypse, and Singularity, which tasks you with escaping an abandoned space station that’s been overrun by robots. Tickets are available from $59 per person on Tuesday – Thursday, and $69 per person on Friday – Sunday, from https://booking.zerolatencyvr.com/book-now/sydney/.

   Sydney-siders visiting our new venue can also have peace of mind that our safety and hygiene standards remain high too, with vigorous sanitisation and disinfection of all the gear they’ll be using.

2. Many people are familiar with home console VR gaming but can you explain free roam VR and the difference between them?

   With in-home VR gaming, your play space and movement is limited to how long the VR headset wires are or how large your living room is, and it’s largely a solo experience unless you’re playing online.

   In free roam VR, you can move freely within the 200 square metre arena, and enjoy the experience with up to seven friends in the same room. Our experiences have been designed specifically to make the most of the arena to encourage you to physically walk around the space and feel more immersed in the game. It creates more flow to the experience rather than the player remaining stationary. The experiences have also been designed to scale movement, so players lose themselves in the space.

   You can see everyone in your session within the virtual space, and we’ve got in-game alarms which tell you if you’re in danger of running into someone. We’ve also adjusted these alarms to 1.5 metres to adhere to current social distancing recommendations.

3. With six venues now in Australia along with 46 venues in 22 countries, can you give us an insight into its very impressive growth of Zero Latency VR in the last five years?

   Zero Latency VR first started as us experimenting to see what we could do with VR technology that wasn’t possible in a home environment. The success of Zero Latency VR comes from its unique offering, but what we weren’t expecting to have such a big impact was the social aspect of the experience.

   We’ve had over 1.5 million games played globally, and often we see returning players who came with one group of friends, returning with another because they see it as an activity they can do together, and it is still fun and full of surprises every time you play. The appeal of Zero Latency VR is also you don’t need to be a gamer to enjoy the experience. We’ve had customers who’ve tried the experience with gamer friends and returned with a group of others who aren’t familiar with gaming as it’s easy to pick up and enjoy.

4. Where do you see the future of VR heading in the upcoming years?

   The promise of VR is still strong, and people who try VR continue to be blown away by it. I think in-home VR headsets are going to become more accessible, and I hope we keep seeing people experimenting and taking risks with the VR medium to create unique experiences that only VR can produce.

   We’ll start to see other use cases for VR and free-roam VR in particular, such as utilising it for city planning so you can physically walk around spaces before spending billions building them.

5. With the constant growth of the video game industry here in Australia, not just the world, along with the growth of Esports, do you see a place in the future for the two to combine? And if so do think the Zero Latency VR venues could be the next hub for Esports?

   We have an experience at some of our venues called Sol Raiders, which is a player versus player game, so seeing VR-based esports emerging in the next few years isn’t unimaginable. We’ve hosted our own Sol Raiders tournaments at our venues in Melbourne and Perth previously, and it was a lot of fun for all involved.

   Whether it reaches the popularity of other esports from a spectator perspective will come down to whether there’s audience demand for VR-based esports. The challenge, I think, would be how you broadcast the VR experience as a spectator sport that can be enjoyed and appreciated by viewers and competitors.

6. With the release of FARCRY VR coming to Zero Latency in 2021 will we be seeing more triple-A games in the future for Zero Latency?

   We’re very excited for players to experience Far Cry VR this year exclusively at Zero Latency VR venues, and return to the world of Far Cry 3. We recently held an Alpha test of the game at our Melbourne venue and had over 2,000 player registrations in just under 48 hours!

   We’re always in discussion with developers and publishers who are interested in providing a unique experience for franchise fans, so watch this space.

7. Having 8 players being the most optimal for many of your games, in the future will you be expanding that number of players?

   Eight player groups feel like the perfect number for our current experiences, but if the right experience became available, we’re not going to tell them they must limit to eight players. We’re always conscious of giving players fun experiences and would have to take this into account when considering how adding more players to the play space would affect gameplay.

   It’s fun to imagine a 100-player free-roam battle royale-type space though, isn’t it! However, there are bottlenecks in Wi-Fi capacity and shared space tracking that need to be resolved before that is a reality.

8. Any tips for first-time players?

   Just have fun with the experience. Free-roam VR is like the awe of experiencing VR for the first time all over again, and if it’s the first time you’re experiencing VR in general, welcome to a whole new world of entertainment!

9. What is your favourite game at Zero Latency?

   I’m a massive shooter guy, so right now, I’m loving Undead Arena. It takes all the things we have learned from our games and blends them up into a fast, fun arcade-style zombie slaying fest. It never gets old incinerating the living dead in a flame thrower trap. Never.

And there you have it. We’d like to give a huge thanks to Tim for his time. If you’d like to know more about Zero Latency VR, head over to: https://zerolatencyvr.com/

Thanks to Tim and the team over at Zero Latency VR, we have 2 x Double Passes to giveaway that can be used at their Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne venues. For your chance to WIN, head over to: https://www.mkaugaming.com/giveaway-2-x-double-passes-to-zero-latency-vr/