Brent Bushnell runs a circus - but not the kind you might remember from your childhood. It's a Micro-Amusement Park, combining virtual reality, escape rooms and carnival games - with liberal amounts of acrobats and flames of fire.
Son of Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, Brent helped co-found Two Bit Circus. and he’s determined to show people, especially children that inventions and science can be fun and creative.
Brent about to try the flaming dunk tank. Photo: Two Bit Circus
“We are a high tech circus, this is a lot of interactive entertainment, it’s almost the size of a football field, we’re talking about a virtual reality arena, a 100ft interactive theatre, a re-imagined carnival midway, what we call story rooms, our version of an escape room - this is about getting people together to play.”
It’s social interaction play and it’s multi-player, he says.
Content creators and game makers are able to publish their content onto the platform of the amusement park. On the hardware side of things, the company combines a range of technology to create their experiences; virtual reality headsets, projectors and cheap computers, micro controllers that make distributive sensors easier to interact with and cameras that are used in Xbox Connect.
With a computer science and electrical engineering background, Bushnell teamed up with roboticists during the recession in 2008. They were frustrated people were on social media and playing video games at home alone.
“The reality of it is we’re social animals, we want to be around other people and you can buy a six pack of beer and drink it at home but people still go out to a bar and drink together.”
They started with parties as a way to bring people together and all of a sudden they were doing 5000 person events.
The original version was a whiteboard with a camera and a projector pointed at it. “We liked the low-tech, low-tech analogue is super easy, people walk up, they know what to do with a whiteboard but computer vision was getting really easy, open source and low cost…”
It’s a company that has evolved in response to market demand, he says.
A lot of interactions are passive; you read a book, you watch a movie, you’re entertained at. “Immersive entertainment - you now get to be part of the show and video games started with this, you get to control the character with your thumb but with all this new tech and a lot of these new approaches, whether it’s escape rooms, immersive theatre, things like Sleep No More in New York, virtual reality, augmented reality, all of a sudden you get to take on a role and you get to be part of a show and you’re not just being entertained at, you’re having to make decisions and use your skills.”
It’s much more like how we actually interact with the world, he says.
There’s full body, three realm virtual reality where you put on a headset and you wander around in an environment where the physical space your body is in matches what you see in the world. “In one of ours, you’re wandering through a maze and the walls in the maze match the walls in the physical environment that you’re in, so you feel like you’re really there. The second that what you touch matches what you see in the VR headset, the illusion is complete.”
In the story room, you can pilot a spaceship, it’s multi role and a little bit more like a video game.
“It’s a great time to be playing with tech, the tools are getting better than they’ve ever been.”
