Imagine that you are making your way through an escape room game that said in an underground bunker deep in the Amazon jungle. Without warning the walls part 2 reveal slits set in the Stone from which the poison darts of blow guns rain down upon you. you need to jump and press yourself against the walls to avoid a certain death. Unfortunately and U2 2nd number of restraints we cannot play out the scenario in real life. But you can do it in a virtual escape room.

Endless VR Options

In fact, in virtual reality, you can simulate anything you wish without exposing your customers to any real danger at all. For the first time you're able to create an escape room experience, that just a few years ago, would have been impossible. And these new experiences can be based around real-life or any type of fantasy world. Again, for the first time a user or player can interact with a totally artificial environment. One which has been especially designed to create the optimum escape room experience. Designed to up the ante when it comes to sheer excitement. One to get the pulse running! 

We found three main reasons why a virtual  reality can offer such good value for both businesses and players in the escape room space.

Total Immersion

An immersive experience allows an active stakeholder to feel as though they are part and parcel of the creation going on around them. Another way of looking at it is they are the polar opposite of being a passive observer. All traditional escape room games try to recreate a make-believe world which is often reinforced by the initial narrative, as well as the props and decoration. In many ways the business is trying to persuade the players they are actually in a separate world from the real one just outside the front door. The actions within this fantastic world will give them a stake in the final outcome. We would suggest that immersion is the number one defining feature that makes an escape room so exciting. To that end it's no surprise that virtual reality, by being able to create alternative realities, can at the same time, lead to a totally immersive experience.

The Range of Possible Experiences

Many traditional brick-and-mortar escape room games tend to follow a similar formula. Though the games themselves can be very exciting due to the fact that an unseen clock is ticking down the time left, there is no sense of real danger. With our initial example we used poison darts shot from blow guns to Give a sense of a deadly danger. Because a VR player is not physically in the VR world they are exploring, then any outlandish, dangerous or fantastic actions will not cause harm to a single person in reality. This allows escape room businesses to create any number of much more exciting scenarios, with even the possibility of virtual death resulting from wrong decisions being made throughout gameplay or with the time finally running down completely.

Space Constraints Become Redundant

There are some other important aspects of real life escaping games that VR games are able to offer much better solutions. The first of these is our space constraints. A regular brick-and-mortar escape room needs actual physical rooms. With a number of different gaming scenarios, and with each one needing its own especially decorated room, then it's easy to see why the rent is the largest running cost to maintain an escape room business.  So it’s not surprising that this space in any town or city is going to prove expensive. That's why you often find escape room games are often situated in the cheaper parts of any urbanisation. And even then, many will be situated in the cheapest part of the building, namely the basement. Thankfully, VR does away with the necessity of many rooms.

Of course, mounting a virtual escape room will still need space. The players will need to either stand or sit. Perhaps a player will have the ability to move within constraints. But the space requirements are going to be considerably less than those needed to run a traditional brick-and-mortar escape room game. 

VR Escape Rooms To Stimulate All The Senses

With today's technology allowing for better and better VR and AR experiences, we can see in the near future that these apparatus will be able to trigger and enhance all human senses: those of sound, smell, sight, taste and touch. Right now sight and sound are well taken care of. And thanks to Haptic gloves, the sensation of touch is now being covered. New technology being developed will allow for the players in a VR Escape room to experience a much higher level of immersion thanks to new input technology that's able to trigger the whole spectrum of human senses and emotions.

The Future is Coming, And It’s VR

In the near future we see games players as being more demanding when it comes to both immersive and interactive experiences. Many players may be already familiar with metaverse platforms that offer almost endless possibilities to their experiences. By using multi sensory input systems, all escape room games will be able to offer a huge number of gaming options which will include every type of experience imaginable. With the escape room genre continuing to grow in popularity, we see the addition of VR and AR will only help enhance and promote these popular games.