Augmented Reality & esports in a theme park
We have a patent on Augmented Reality & esports in a theme park. Viewers outside a theme park interact with visitors in it.
It is 3 ideas = Disneyland + Pokémon + Twitch = Theme Park + Augmented Reality + eSports.
Is the Metaverse Augmented Reality or Virtual Reality? Niantic (owned by Nintendo and Google) says AR is the way forward. Spurred by Niantic’s global success with Pokemon Go and Ingress. The top 2 AR games. Nothing else comes close in AR. Niantic argues that AR on smartphones is more affordable than persuading users to buy a new VR headset. These are expensive and have a small user base. Meta (nee Facebook) and Microsoft appear to differ. Both are intensively working on new VR hardware. Meta suggests there might be a continuum of effort, from websites to AR to VR. We (Linket) are neutral and have a patent portfolio for Metaverse.
We use Disneyland as an archetypal theme park. Our remarks apply to parks run by other firms, including Universal Studios, Nintendo and Lego.
Gameplay includes Mixed Reality strategy and team building of remote viewers and Theme Park/eSports Arena visitors. Strategy expands to ambush play and a mix of on site and off site collaboration.
Visitors are in the park, in a scavenger hunt. Viewers are outside the park. They watch. Like watching Survivor or NFL. Viewers control machinery inside the park, to aid or hinder visitors. (Think Hunger Games.) A viewer teams with a visitor, against other teams.
In the diagram, the park has devices controllable by visitors and viewers. A viewer uses an app to interact. A visitor uses an app on a mobile device. Viewers watch or follow a visitor (akin to eSports). A viewer changes physical aspects at the park. Visitor and viewer can form a team. A viewer can aid or hinder a visitor. Visitor and viewer can trade virtual assets. There can be multiple Mixed Realities. (Different games played in the same area.)
Examples of triggered experiences
1. A viewer controls the release of aromas in the vicinity of a visitor.
2. A loudspeaker whose volume is adjusted remotely.
3. Another device controls detectable tactile changes via haptic means.
4. Doors to buildings or cupboards that are remotely controlled.
There is a qualitative difference between this park interaction and eSports. It is rare for viewers to alter an eSports game. Our patent lets viewers alter the game in a theme park.
Escape Room Experiences
Escape rooms have become popular lately. An escape room is a room, or a set of adjacent rooms, where visitors are confined. They deduce how to leave, based on clues in the room. One problem afflicting this genre is scaling. Revenue is limited by how many people take part. By implementing some of the methods of the earlier sections, the room can have a remote viewer audience. Viewers interact with visitors through electronic screens in the room, and via apps used by the viewers and visitors.
Currently in parks, there is relatively little competition. Perhaps so anyone could visit and experience all the themes. But the park might find it productive to have a theme area be used for 2 audiences. One general. The other being experienced players, who perhaps complete a course in minimum time. Or some other equivalent, challenging requirement. This increases audience interest and involvement.
One characteristic is that the controlling of the devices by the park is largely based on preset decisions and perhaps by the actions of the visitor, giving incentive for visitors to come back for new experiences. In terms of visitors’
privacy, the park can indicate to visitors that certain sections of the park have these experiences. Visitors consent to participation.
In general, the viewer app and visitor app are different. But a park could merge both into one app. One consideration is that the visitor app is for a mobile device. The viewer app can have several versions — for mobile and fixed devices. Because the viewer can be walking around with a mobile device, or sitting down at a PC, for example.
The patent monetizes a remote audience of viewers watching events in the park, while solving four problems.
- Experential. Parks struggle with cost and innovation to make unique and memorable experiences so visitors will return, as well as having others visit the park for the first time. The patent lets parks create unique Mixed Reality experiences which combine elements of eSports in a theme park.
2. Compete with computer games. It can be hard to motivate people to invest in tickets, travel and accommodation, when they can enjoy games for a fraction of the cost, in their home. The patent gives theme parks a way to compete with computer games while increasing the demographic of people who opted not to visit.
3. Unlimited remote viewers. A problem a theme park has is its physical size. There are legal limits on maximum attendance. It is expensive in land and buildings for a park to significantly expand its footprint. Now the park increases mindshare and brand awareness to hundreds of millions of new potential customers by a vicarious experience.
4. 24 hour park. The park closes at night, for restocking and maintenance. Now portions of the park hold events and hosts remote viewers. In a pandemic, the park continues business with a large remote audience.
Reification
Viewers and visitors were described as interacting in 2 broad modes. One is where the both are in the same game, where the viewers might be followers of a visitor or on the same team as the visitor. Another, the viewers and visitors are playing separate games, with the interaction being the passing of virtual items between them. Consider when both are in the same game. One gameplay feature is reification. A virtual item becomes (reifies into) a real corresponding item.
Disney, Universal Studios and Nintendo
One issue with players in a theme park is when they go to the park at the same time as current visitors, who are not there to play games. The visitors might regard the gamers as a nuisance. How to answer this?
On a global level, the largest theme park firms are Disney and Universal. In Japan Nintendo has a Super Nintendo World theme park. It teamed up with Universal to bring this to the US. Disney’s original field was movies/cartoons. In the 1950s it opened up Disneyland with animatronics. Later it bought Marvel and Star Wars. Its core strength is movies and to some extent this is reflected in its parks, with a Galaxy’s Edge Star Wars theme. In contrast Nintendo was always about gaming. Nintendo is likely the world’s consistently most successful game firm. Its Japanese theme park is all about gaming. We expect that a Universal-Nintendo park in the US will continue this approach.
To attendees of a Nintendo park, having gamers in their presence playing a game should be seen as a plus. From the descriptions of the Japanese park, the attractions are often games or modelled on Nintendo hit games.
Likely the park would expect to recruit gamers (with a remote audience watching) from the attendees. In current parlance, gamers are not a bug but a feature. People going to a Nintendo park (US or Japan) might want to see those gamers or to join and actively take part.
Indeed our patent might be an optimal fit for Universal-Nintendo.
Disneylands (Anaheim, Florida, Shanghai, Paris) may be different. Disney for all its strengths has never been a top ranked game firm. There are Star Wars and Marvel games, and those do well, but not greatly. Attendees cannot be assumed to be gamers. Or even if they are, they might not be attending and expecting to see active gamers.
A pain point is queuing for rides and food and drink. Visitors carry phones with cameras and GPS. The gamers might be required to wear a distinctive garb, like hats. Different teams wear different hats. If a visitor takes a photo of a player, this can be in an app made by the park. The photo is uploaded to the app server and image recognition detects that she photographed a player. She is credited an amount of tokens, to encourage her to photograph other players. Image recognition prevents her just taking 10 photos of the same player for more tokens.
Wait! Why can’t the park require the visitor to ask the players to show their park badge or id, to be scanned by the visitor? Remember that the visitor is not there to watch the game. Having her go to the players and ask them may be a step too much for some visitors. We need to minimise their manual steps.
An elaboration is if the visitor takes photos of players from different teams. There might be a standard amount of 10 tokens per player that she gets. But for a player from a hitherto unscanned team, she gets an extra credit of 15 tokens.
There can be a gamification aspect. 1 in 100 visitors who photos players might be randomly chosen to get a prize of more tokens.
Nor does the interaction have to be via photos. If visitors and gamers carry phones with geolocation accurate down to the meter, then a visitor runs her app and sees which players are nearby. If she goes close enough (5 meters, 10 meters?) to a player, the app can credit her for this. A park might consider this preferable.
The park might design its app so visitors do not have to actually talk to the players. Some people are too shy to talk to strangers, so having them be able to register as being close to a player can be a design win for the app. It increases the ease of taking part.
Tokens are virtual and redeemed for a discount on food and drink. This makes the presence of nearby gamers a boon to visitors.
This also addresses another point. Suppose a park gets 20,000 visitors. But only 100 players enter at the same time. The disparity between these numbers means if a visitor has to closely interact with a player many visitors might miss out.
The missing out can be understood in 2 ways. If a visitor misses out, it might be because she just did not see many gamers near her. So she is not much affected by their presence; she won’t complain.
If the visitor interacts with nearby gamers, she can at least derive some tangible benefit.
One variant on the redemption of tokens is that they might be spendable on gifts in the gift shop. Or on other products made by the park and sold outside, like hotel rooms.
The park app run by visitors on their phones can also suggest they go to some locations where players are congregating, to let visitors see something exciting (hopefully), like the climax of a scavenger hunt. This can be fine tuned by the park to avoid having too many visitors cram an area. It is also useful to give good visuals of a crowd to the remote audience.
The minimising of wait times in a queue is possible, to an extent. A visitor with enough tokens might spend some on jumping to an express queue. Another way is to let a gamer get into a queue and essentially give up her place to a few visitors. There has to be a limit on the number of such visitors, to avoid resentment by others in line. Why would the gamer do this? It could be a requirement of her game. And when she steps out of line for others, she scans their badges or tags that the park issued to visitors. This proves she stood in line and validates her to go to the next step of the game.
In the real world, some long queues have people making money by standing in line for others. We transfer this idea to a theme park, with the twist that the waiting is done by gamers who have to do something in the game while in line. The script of the game needs to be altered for this, to have tasks that can be done by gamers queuing up for rides that they have no interest in. What these tasks in the (scavenger hunt) game are is up to the screenwriters or game designers.
It is the park’s decision as to whether the visitor taking the gamer’s place has to pay the gamer with tokens. Perhaps the visitor gets it for free, to build up even more goodwill towards gamers. It is an aspect appealing to visitors who are not into the gaming mindset.
A useful variant is to require that 2 or more gamers in a team join a queue, at the same place in the queue, for a minimum amount of time. The 2 or more recognises that people going to the park often go with others, so it’s more valuable that 2 or more visitors can take the gamers’ spot. This is if a gamer can only swap her spot with 1 or 2 others.
By the park building this requirement of waiting in a queue in some games, it builds goodwill in visitors towards the gamers.
This assumes that gamers are visually different from the visitors. Some park games might require gamers to blend (“undercover”) with the visitors. If done correctly the visitors will not notice and thus not be mindful of the gamers.
Another aspect is that the game is essentially some type of scavenger hunt. In an environment where the gamers are intermingled with non-players, this is a “safe” type of game, as opposed to a shooter game, even with clearly fake cartoony firearms. During the scavenger hunt, gamers will periodically find clues. At those times, this finding can be accompanied by the gamers being able to distribute prizes (eg teddy bears branded with the park’s logo) or just the tokens. Some of these can be for the gamers. But, and this is the point, the other prizes can be for visitors near the gamers.
It is up to the game designers to specify whether the gamers can hand these prizes to visitors near them, or if the handing out can be determined automatically by the game, based on the locations of the visitors vis a vis the location of the found clue. The latter may be easier on the gamers. And it avoids any unfair distribution if it is done by the gamers. The intent is to build goodwill amongst the visitors towards the gamers and the park.
Imagine for example a game being played by mostly teenage boys. They find a clue and they get to hand out prizes to nearby visitors. It is no stretch of the imagination to expect that they might favor the pretty girls nearby. Whereas the fat girls, the ugly girls will not be so lucky. Of course, with teams of gamers, some teams will be girls only, some boys only, some mixed. And not all boys teams will do this. But it has to be expected that boys only teams are more likely to do such things.
Remember too that with the remote audience, the finding of clues may well be crucial visual moments in the narrative. These need to be made as photogenic as possible. The distribution of prizes to an audience of visitors can be such a moment.
Finally, let’s turn to the Universal and Nintendo partnership. Universal will build a Nintendo theme park inside its US theme parks. (Maybe eventually outside the US as well.) Meanwhile, Universal has a license for the Harry Potter theme parks and it has built 2 of these in the US (LA and Florida). We might expect that the Harry Potter areas might also be conducive to a scavenger hunt that stays compatible with the Harry Potter theme.
Note that a scavenger hunt may be better suited for greater gamer participation than in the superpower-type backdrop of the Marvel or Star Wars that Disney has. The hunt in the Harry Potter backdrop does not need personas to be the buff types of Marvel or Star Wars.
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8 December 2020 — The patent issued today. Finally! The PTO told us that Covid was hampering their internal processing of patents.
