It’s not the Starship Enterprise, but Westfield Topanga & The Village shopping mall is debuting a retail store next week where Valley techies — and Trekkies — can try out the virtual reality industry’s best imitation of the famous Star Trek “holodeck.” SandboxVR, a startup headquartered in Hong Kong, builds VR centers where customers can band together for fully immersive gaming experiences, from fighting hordes of the undead in a rotting mansion to riding an elevator to space — and of course it goes horribly wrong. Earlier this year, Sandbox raised $68 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company currently operates nine VR centers, including in San Mateo, Vancouver, Singapore, Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia. The Westfield Topanga location — the company’s first in Southern California — will open Aug. 29. “I call it version 0.1 of the holodeck,” said Sandbox President Siqi Chen. “When you look down and see your body in virtual reality — that’s the real magic.” Experiences cost $48 per person. Customers will spend about 30 minutes immersed in VR, preceded by a 15-minute training period and some extra time built in for check-in and equipment outfitting. They can choose between four games: zombie thriller “Deadwood Mansion,” space epic “Amber Sky 2088,” ocean adventure “The Curse of Davy Jones” and the brand-new “Star Trek: Discovery Away” mission. Sandbox’s centers combine traditional VR with the company’s proprietary motion capture technology, which works in real time and can handle multiple simultaneous users — a rarity in the field. Add touch sensors, customized hardware and a 1,000-square-foot empty room, and you’ve got a Sandbox. Users are outfitted with a vibrating vest that lets them feel everything that happens in VR (like a zombie bite or a shift in gravity), a supercomputer backpack that powers the experience wirelessly, motion detecting sensors on the ankles and wrists, earphones and of course a headset. Chen said the main factor distinguishing Sandbox’s VR from that of take-home commercial products such as the HTC Vive, Microsoft HoloLens, Oculus Rift, or Go and Quest headsets is its free range of motion, uninhibited by obstacles or wiring. Without expensive hardware and a vast excess of space, it’s impossible to achieve the level of immersion Sandbox provides at home. Plus, the motion capture trackers that insert each user’s body into the VR space add a key element of realism. “I want VR at home to work, but there are huge hardware challenges,” Chen said. “Who has a large enough house for this? Most people don’t have 1,000 square feet of living space, much less 1,000 square feet devoted to the holodeck.” Sandbox plans to have more than 50 retail storefronts worldwide by the end of 2019, and hundreds by the end of 2020. “We think of this as the first new medium since the moving picture,” Chen said. “This is the story of Warner Bros. and Paramount 100 years ago. We see a huge analogy, historically, from how they developed to how we will develop.”
