![](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125621446/241951821.jpeg)
The VOID’s latest immersive experience, Avengers: Damage Control is available now. We got a look inside and found a great example of what a VR attraction should be. Guest Article by Noah Nelson.
TheGamer – Privacy PolicyWe respect your privacy and we are committed to safeguarding your privacy while online at oursite. The following discloses the information gathering and dissemination practices for this Website.This Privacy Policy was last updated on May 10, 2018. Legal OwnershipTheGamer (the “Website”) is owned and operated by Valnet inc. (“us” or “we”), a corporationincorporated under the laws of Canada, having its head office at 7405 Transcanada Highway,Suite 100, Saint Laurent, Quebec H4T 1Z2. Personal Data CollectedWhen you visit our Website, we collect certain information related to your device, such as yourIP address, what pages you visit on our Website, whether you were referred to by anotherwebsite, and at what time you accessed our Website.We do not collect any other type of personal data. If you are accessing our website through asocial media account, please refer to the social media provider’s privacy policy for informationregarding their data collection.
Log FilesLike most standard Web site servers, we use log files. This includes internet protocol (IP)addresses, browser type, internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, platform type,date/timestamp, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user’smovement in the aggregate, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. The Void is probably the best known location-based virtual reality destinations - and for good reason. If you've been to either Disneyland or Disney World in the last few years you've probably encountered Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire, a groundbreaking VR experience that opened in December 2017 where you and a group of friends go undercover as stormtroopers on Mustafar to aid the rebellion.RELATED:Since then, The Void has introduced VR experiences set in the worlds of Wreck-It Ralph, Ghostbusters, Jumanji, and now, the Avengers. These 20 minute experiences for groups of four are some of the most innovative, immersive, and technologically impressive experiences you can have in VR. To my absolute delight, they're also some of the most fun.
The Void Is Doing What No One Else DoesI get to do A LOT of LBE (location based entertainment) and when it comes to VR, I've gotten pretty immune to the 'you're about to be transported to another world' spiel at the beginning of every experience. Any ounce of been-there-done-that I felt completely melted away when Shuri from Black Panther came on the screen in the introduction video to brief us on our mission.
I'm not going to be doing big spoilers for the story, but right off the bat it struck me just how special it was to have this kind of VR experience in the Avengers world. The headset is a modified Oculus with a hinge that makes it easy to lift up, similar to a catcher's helmet. This isn't really relevant, but I would love for my Oculus to have this design feature.
I also really love the communication system. In other LBE-VR experiences, when someone with you talks their in-game avatar doesn't match the direction or distance from their voice. The Void uses in-headset mics to eliminate this immersion breaking problem.RELATED:Something I didn't realize: The Void uses inside out hand tracking. That means no sensors to attach and no controllers to hold. This is my first experience with true hand tracking in VR and I can't tell you how cool it is interact with things in VR without any input device or sensor. Its a big step towards the Ready Player One dream and I love it.when it worked.
The Downside Of Pushing The LimitAvengers: Damage Control is the coolest LBE-VR experience I've ever had, but it's not without a decent amount of jank. Fellow editor Sergio began the experience with tiny baby hands like Deadpool and we had to restart and switch out our gear about 5 minutes in. Targeting, which is done Iron Man style by extending your arms out to blast targets with energy blasts from your palms, was pretty spotty. Before you begin they remind you that you need to be looking directly at your hands and keep them a good distance away from your headset in order for the tracking to work.
I found I was pretty distracted throughout the experience by the inconsistent hand tracking and requirement that they stay 'in frame.' But honestly, it's a completely worthy trade off for me. I love that The Void is pushing things are far as they can go, it puts them in a position to continue innovating and moving the technology forward. Eventually I can imagine the space will be equipped with sensors for outside tracking that will eliminate these limitations, but for now it worked perfectly fine enough. A World-Ending Crisis? Happens Around Here All The TimeAs I said, I don't want to get into major spoiler territory, but I will say I was stunned at how big the story of Damage Control is. You have interactions with just about every single Avenger, many of which voiced by the actual MCU actor, and you fight a legitimate MCU villain to boot.
I sort of expected this to be a side adventure with some Marvel details and a cameo or two, but this is actually a Marvel fans dream experience. Fighting along side the entire cast of Endgame is pretty incredible. RELATED:The 'fighting' part on the other hand, for me, not so much. You have a small kit of tools, namely pointing your palms out to fire charge shots, bringing your hands together to fire a slower, bigger charge shot, holding your arm up to make a shield, holding both arms up to make a big shield, and firing a tracking missiles when you've charged up enough energy. It's a pretty elegant, input-less control scheme that any one of any skill level can definitely manage, but I felt like the fighting sequences were by far the weakest part of the experience. They mostly amount to standing still and holding your arms out, making slight adjustments to target enemies and fighting against the spotty hand tracking.
I would have much preferred a purely cinematic experience without the shooting, or one that required a great deal more physicality. The cinematic set pieces are really what you came for, and they absolutely shine.
The things The Void does with sound, temperature, wind, and physical objects create the kind of magical moments that, frankly, only Disney theme parks themselves can rival. Worth Every PennyEven though the experience has no variation, I can see myself going again to show a family member or friend who hasn't seen it. More importantly, I'm absolutely going to seek out and try every single experience The Void has to offer. I'm fortunate enough to live in Southern California where I can get to 4 different location easily, but if you live in a different state or country and aren't planning a trip to California any time soon, the good news is that is adding more locations in cities and countries across the world. Currently you can also experience Avengers: Damage Control in Atlanta, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Plano, and Washington, DC.
![The The](http://cdn03.androidauthority.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/TheVoidVR.jpg)
It is clear-cut canon that the personal abode of Darth Vader sits amid the Outer Rim Territories, above a locus of the dark side of the Force, on the moonless planet of Mustafar. I visited its environs just the other day, while playing Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire, which is essentially a noisy theme-park ride beamed into a virtual-reality headset. My squadmates and I ventured there, on behalf of the Rebel Alliance, and we shot up some Storm Troopers, and I could have sworn that Lord Vader himself brandished a lightsabre in our direction. Mustafar this time of year is a volcanic hellscape—awesome and exhausting at once, much like the V.R. Sensory experience. Secrets of the Empire is a simple first-person-plural shooting game, a disorienting energy-drink buzz of sensation, and a frothing display of a powerful franchise. It’s also a trust fall into the arms of the VOID, the producer of the show.
The company’s name is an acronym of Vision Of Infinite Dimensions; before starting it, in 2015, its founders had careers as a theme-park entrepreneur, in the field of interactive design, and among Las Vegas magicians, respectively. The VOID’s initial attraction, Ghostbusters: Dimension (2017), which set up shop at Madame Tussauds wax museum in Times Square, provided customers with the digital illusion of a proton pack, and sent them through a few small rooms in the guise of paranormal exterminators. The VOID has flourished from the parks of Disney to the emirate of Dubai. A bushel of Marvel content is on its way.Consult your local shopkeeper for further details. In 2017, the that the VOID “sees itself as a new draw for dying malls.” In 2019, the VOID is developed by Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, a commercial real-estate developer with a Pynchonian name that suits the postmodernity of the proceedings. Going wide, Secrets of the Empire is now screening at shopping centers from California to the New York island, among the sock kiosks and mocha dispensaries, monetizing meatspace in the age of the online marketplace. The commercial monoculture is consolidating, it seems: the fortresses of brick-and-mortar retailers shore themselves up by offering carnival rides to virtual worlds with hall-of-fame brand-recognition rankings.
This could be a staple of the mall experience on par with testing ingeniously meaningless products beneath the disco lights of Spencer Gifts, or taking the reins of a coin-operated riding duck. Players entered in groups of three or four.
I was the third wheel on the date of some strangers; we shared the guarded cordiality of commuters. We entered an anteroom to receive our mission from Diego Luna, who flickered onto a screen as Captain Cassian Andor, from the stirring ancillary property titled “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” (2016). The captain was urgent and clear, like Leia pleading for Obi-Wan’s help, and also as if Luna had Skyped the performance in from his laptop. We revisited an essential trope.
Disguised as Storm Troopers, we rebels would infiltrate an Imperial stronghold. It was espionage in pursuit of a MacGuffin stored within a cargo crate, which looked sometimes like a coffin and sometimes like a dagger, in adherence to the sinister tradition of Sith design culture.The headset and digital prosthesis dropped us into the fiction, and I might have been elated just to tiptoe cooing at the depth of the animated galaxies, as seen from the windows of spacecraft.
There’s an instant kick of visceral excitement, a Pavlovian jolt, in being enveloped in a bone-familiar pop fable. This gives way to mild queasiness. We hesitated in confusion before grabbing our blasters, the plastic toy guns serving as wireless gaming controls, but we grabbed them.
I found myself committing to the absurdity of trying to follow correct gun-handling practices while preparing to blast away at computer-generated Storm Troopers.It was, obviously, a lot of fun to waste the Storm Troopers—a disposable class of being, with rights and privileges on the level of zombies—but it was loud. I had no sense of time, but, after a solid two minutes of shooting, I was bored. How did slaughtering these villains, whose slain bodies fell into vast lava pits, advance the mission? What were the cultural implications of being in here, at the heart of a franchise, at luxurious leisure, in the age of mass shootings? How many scalps had I collected?
Wouldn’t it taste sweeter to see a numerical tally floating like a ghost?A beast rose from a lava. An igneous arachnid? A Mustafarian lava flea! I reflexively shot at the lava flea, which was busy destroying a Storm Trooper.
I wondered whether I had erred in prejudging the lava flea; the enemy of my Storm Trooper is my friend. A large lava flea advanced. It was tediously resilient, but it died, and we advanced to the next stage. A third-tier sidekick droid named K-2SO, allegedly programmed to support the Alliance, chirped sarcastically at us. The rigging of my suit buzzed, from nowhere, like an unanswerable phone, or a pickup-window gizmo for a meal I hadn’t ordered. We shot more Storm Troopers. I might have shot the cargo crate bearing the precious MacGuffin.
Was this Lord Vader himself? His sabre flared as if to strike us down, but things changed, incomprehensibly, and Diego Luna told us we’d done a good job.When Secrets of the Empire ejected us back into the mall, I steadied myself by the merch stand peddling caps and clothing. The most attractive of these was a soft, black, made-in-the-U.S.A. T-shirt with a cryptic gold graphic, like pseudo-Masonic runes, with a design somewhat indebted to the album art for “Badmotorfinger.” It cost twenty-five dollars, according to the screen at the cash wrap. The merchandise itself does not have price tags, which makes you wonder if the cost is subject to fluctuate, like an Uber ride or a lobster roll. The shirt was a souvenir of participation. We had been “participants”—not quite so autonomous as “players,” but not so complacent as “audience members.” At times, I’d had the sense of watching myself being played.
We had been on a journey to the locus of the dark side of the Force—a distant corner of a blockbuster franchise, a branded arcade all up in your cyberspace, in the middle of the mall, in an empty room.
![](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125621446/241951821.jpeg)