The entrance to Dubai Mall’s VR Park which opened in March 2018.Brennan Cusack
Dubai’s new theme park offers experiences from desert safaris to skydiving, bank heists to lessons in surviving the apocalypse all within a 26,000 square foot space in Dubai Mall. Welcome to VR Park.
For $40, visitors can get unlimited access to 18 virtual reality (VR) experiences introduced through a high-resolution, high-FOV StarVR headset. The park opened in March, just in time for the summer season when packs of teenagers and families with young children flock to the malls to get out of the heat. According to supervisor Harry Cequina, this crowd is pouring in to the new attraction. Could this be the future of theme parks?
At its base level, VR does not require as much world-building infrastructure as traditional theme parks. Before VR Park arrived, its space in Dubai Mall housed Sega Republic which had a variety of carnival and arcade games. Today, a John Wick-themed VR experience stands where there used to be a bumper car arena. Other than a VR headset and gun, the game’s stations are sparse. One station is for fighting zombies, the other for hunting bad guys on a yacht. Physically, however, the only difference between the two is that one has a bench. Once the headset is on, that bench is revealed to be a seat in a helicopter hovering above rioting zombies.
Without permanent infrastructure like a bumper cars, experiences like John Wick can be interchanged to meet a trend without hassle. In six months, John Wick could be traded out for a more popular hero. As new attractions cycle through, there will always be a reason to return to the VR Park.
With VR, an entire theme park can be condensed into a smaller space. At the VR Park, a family of four sits down in a safari car and puts on their headsets. Almost at once, the car shakes on its axels and they’re off on a virtual runaway desert safari. The experience is similar to the popular Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland except this one doesn’t require a full track.
VR can also add value to traditional rides. The most popular game according to Cequina, is the Dubai Drone where elements of VR and old-school theme parks combine. This ride takes place on a real rollercoaster left over from Sega Republic. However, as cars zoom over the VR Park, their passengers are looking into headsets that show Dubai in year 2050: a sparkling metropolis complete with delivery drone traffic.
Theme parks like this one are beginning to pick up steam across the world in cities like Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, Miami, New York City and more. In Tokyo, a VR park was turning people away on the weekends because it was so popular. Similar parks started popping up across Japan. In April, China opened up their own fantasy-themed VR park that spans over 14 million square feet. Riding off of virtual reality’s popularity in China, developers believe the park will boost tourism in the southwest region. Chinese think tank CCID predicts the virtual reality market will increase tenfold in the country by 2020.
In the Middle East, the market for virtual reality is expected to increase as well. International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts it will develop in value from $181.59 million in 2017 to $6 billion in 2020. IDC explains that this increase is due in part to VR expanding into new sectors. Already in the UAE, VR is being introduced into healthcare and education. VR headsets in Dubai elementary schools are used across all subjects to help immerse students in lessons and boost their knowledge retention. While this new technology might seem disruptive to older generations, youth are growing up with it integrated into their daily lives.
However, in terms of replicating reality, VR technology has not been perfected. At the VR Park, pixelation can occasionally cause headaches while glitches can ruin experiences. One visitor coming from the VR Park skydiving, weighed her experience, “I’ve actually been skydiving, so… it was a bit digital.” Then, she entered a horror experience where players blow off zombie heads with shotguns. For now, perhaps its good that a distinction remains between the real and virtual. The value of one is in experiencing what you can’t in the other.