Wednesday, July 18, 2018
SPACES' Shiraz Akmal On Making VR A Real Life Experience
How do you apply virtual reality (VR) technology, and turn it from just a nifty technology trick, to something which is truly a lifelike journey you can experience with friends? Santa Monica-based SPACES (www.spaces.com), led by CEO Shiraz Akmal and a team of entertainment veterans from Dreamworks Animation, is hoping to do that with a series of physical attractions, powered by VR technology. We caught up with Shiraz to learn more about the company's origins from within Dreamworks Animation, and what it's hoping to bring to a location near you soon. SPACES recently announced a deal with Skydance Media to bring Terminator Genisys to life as a “VR journey”, where consumers will get to experience an immersive VR attraction where they become part of the world of Terminator.
What is SPACES?
Shiraz Akmal: We were the team at Dreamworks Animation, building location-based attractions for many years, such as How To Train A Dragon VR, to Shrek and Friends, working on those for theme parks and mall installations. Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was CEO of Dreamworks at the time, gave Brad Herman and myself, who were heading up the group working on those projects, the green light to start SPACES at Dreamworks. About two and a half years ago, we spun out of Dreamworks. Comcast led our investment round, and the former CFO of Dreamworks joined us soon after. Investing along with Comcast was a Chinese theme park operator, Songcheng, which has the second largest theme park in China with north of 25 million guests. Everyone came in to support our vision of bringing the next generation of location-based attractions to locations around the world. We have an expert team, marrying world-class IP from Hollywood, and videogames and bringing that into this new format. Our new format lets guests take a journey into amazing experiences together, with their friends. We're building attractions that are VR-enabled. We recently announced a partnership with Skydance Media, based out here in Santa Monica, where we will bring Terminator, the first of many experiences, to SPACES locations and partners this year. We also have a Chinese partnership with Songcheng, where we will be building theme park-scale attractions, using Chinese IP, for their parks. Terminator will also be involved there too.
You mention you'd be doing this for theme parks before, what kind of venues would this technology go into here?
Shiraz Akmal: We have locations ranging from a few thousand feet, to great than 10,000 square feet. We take that physical space, and transform into a virtual playground, a videogame and movie interactive experience. Depending on the throughput for a location, how many people per hour, we can scale the attraction to meet the demand. In the U.S., Cinemark announced in May that they have selected SPACES as one of their key VR partners. That's just one example of a partnership where SPACES is partnering with a theater chain to bring what we build to their guests.
Will you mainly be going to market with this through partners, or will you run your own locations?
Shiraz Akmal:We're doing both. We're opening up a Southern California location soon, and we'll be talking more about that when we're ready in the coming weeks to months. Generally, our strategy has been to partner with companies that have audiences. These companies are generally looking for the next greatest thing they can bring to their audiences. As I mentioned some of our recent partnerships, with partners who have guests who are always looking for something exciting, or a reason to come back. What's we've created is a turnkey solution to plug into these pre-existing destinations. So, in general, we are taking a very partnership-based approach, because it's worked well for us. Our expertise is effectively coming up with what does that future experience look like, building it, and bringing it to guests. That's what's driving our business.
Having built these kind of experiences for Dreamworks in the past, and now working on SPACES, what lesson have you learned on making sure they're not just a gimmick?
Shiraz Akmal: Our philosophy has been always to remember we are an entertainment company, not a VR company, and not a tech company. We're an entertainment company. Our product, at the end of the day, has to be more exciting than other existing options for entertainment today. Our philosophy is, we have to build the best experience, and create the most immersive environment, and push the limits—because, ultimately, that's what consumers want, and what our partners want. We've chosen that path as a business. That's largely what we operated at Dreamworks and here, is to deliver on that promise, creating a completely immersive, fun experience. When major partners are trying to decide what options they can plug into their business and who they should partner with, it will be really clear. Jeffrey Katzenberg told Brad and I, although virtual reality may be great technology, what is important is to provide an amazing experience which you can build a business out of. That's been a part of our DNA.
In an age where there's virtual reality technology you can run at home, what gets people off the couch, out of their house and out to an experience like yours?
Shiraz Akmal: That's a very smart question. What we build are things you can never do at home. We have to deliver on the promise, that this is something that can only be possible at a location like a park, or a tourist destination. To do that, our experiences and spaces are social. It's something you and I and our friends can all go out and do together. We are going on an experience together. We even have you go through an amazing process where you face is scanned in 3D as part of the experience, and the experience starts long before you put that VR headset on. The whole preshow is important, and there's a mission briefing, and it's very theme park-like in the building, all the way to the experience itself in VR. Plus, it's an amazing VR experience. It's not just the visuals, but you feel everything that you see, whether it's heat from an explosion in the Terminator, or the rumbling as the ground shakes as a spaceship goes overhead. It's actually being able to reach out and touch things, and see and feel them. What we are doing, is stitching together the physical to digital, in a way that you can smell, hear, touch, and feel the world around you, and more importantly, do it there for you with your friends so it's a shared experience. Ultimately, you come out of it with a shared memory. That's something you just can't do at home. What of the sweet things we've developed that people just love, is we create a recording of your experience that you and your friends go through together, which you get as a takeaway, and can stream, take and push online, share on Facebook, or even Livestream to Twitch. It's an amazing Director's Cut of the version of what we've just lived through.
When will the public be able to experience this themselves?
Shiraz Akmal: That's happening as early as August. We'll be announcing our first new location in the next month or so, and we'll share more on that later. You'll see different parts of this in the US and the world this year. 2018 is the year people will get a chance to experience SPACES. Based on the hundreds, if not thousands of people we've already have come through our early experiences in the last year behind closed doors, people will love it.
Thanks!