Location-based VR is going from strength to strength around the globe. Black Mirror hits its third city with a Big Apple opening. Zero Latency and Sandbox continue expanding. A new Ubisoft esports title hits Europe. And even 50 Cent is getting In Da LBEXR Club.

And in One Big Thing, I cover the latest search trends showing massive growth in interest in VR experiences. If you’re an FEC owner or in the birthday party business, you need to read it.

EVA licensed the Rabbids brand from Ubisoft and built a paintball-style team game called Rabbids: Color Chaos. Two teams fight across 500 square meters. It runs on LEXRA member PICO's Pico 4 Ultra Enterprise headsets. EVA operates over 70 arenas. Tickets start at 20 euros. Read more...

A new JLL study tracking 4,746 existing venues finds location-based entertainment has crossed from mall amenity to headline tenant category, with brands like Sandbox VR drawing landlord interest as affordable-fun demand reshapes retail leasing dynamics. Read more...

Interstellar Arc, the large-scale immersive VR attraction at AREA15 in Las Vegas, has won Best Location-Based Entertainment at the 2026 Auggie Awards. VRC's deep-dive interview with co-creator Paul Raphael goes inside how the experience was built. Read more...

A new virtual reality arcade has opened at NorthPark Mall in Davenport, Iowa, six years in development and offering motion-sickness-friendly game options. Local leaders are positioning the venue as a foot-traffic driver for the mall, following a pattern set by Sandbox VR's success in mall locations. Read more...

The Summit will be held Oct 6-7 in Dallas. More info coming next week, including a new early bird ticket sale. You can sign up for updates to be notified. For info on why we changed, read more…

Sandbox VR has signed a 10-year lease for a 10,600-square-foot flagship at DelShah Capital's 761-777 Seventh Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, with annual asking rent of $750,000. The space includes 600 square feet on the ground floor and 10,000 square feet on the lower level, just north of Times Square. Read more...

Sandbox VR has opened a new venue in Miami's Wynwood district, one of the city's hippest neighborhoods, bringing the company's global footprint to more than 80 locations. The Miami site features five private gameplay rooms with capacity for groups of up to six players. Read more...

Sandbox VR has announced a new franchise location opening June 12 at Town Square near the Las Vegas Strip, joining two existing corporate-owned venues in the city. The Town Square site sits alongside Activate and Popstroke, with free parking and freeway access aimed at local repeat visitation rather than Strip tourist traffic. Read more...

LEXRA member ENTR has opened its doors on Oosterdokskade, letting visitors step into Amsterdam of 1652 through a 45-minute interactive experience that follows one of three historical characters: a craftswoman, a whaler, or a printer. Tickets start at €18. Read more...

See Reality's "Relive 1776" tour lets Freedom Trail visitors join the Boston Massacre and fire cannons at Bunker Hill through mixed-reality headsets, while the Museum of African American History runs an AI-powered Frederick Douglass hologram and the Lexington Visitors Center launched VR tours of Revolutionary War sites in May. Read more...

Japan's AStation, fresh off its IAAPA Orlando 2025 debut, has launched Ripley's Venture Realm at the Gatlinburg aquarium, overlaying live animal exhibits with Apple Vision Pro mixed reality content. The format echoes earlier Enklu / Verse Immersive deployments at Ripley's Believe It or Not venues, which used HoloLens and Snap Spectacles. Read more...

Valo Motion has introduced Groundfall, a compact, lower-cost mixed-reality attraction built around the floor-is-lava game format that helped drive ValoArena's success. The new product targets venues that want a smaller footprint entry point into mixed-reality attractions. Read more...

Blume Studios in Charlotte is adding "Life Chronicles" and a second Excurio title in June, expanding its cultural VR lineup shortly after launching "Horizon of Khufu." The rapid catalog refresh raises questions about how long a single anchor title can sustain attendance at a standalone immersive venue. Read more...

UploadVR visited Immersive Journey in Yokohama to try two of Excurio's 45-minute free-roam experiences, sub-licensed locally by Cinema Leap and running on HTC VIVE headsets. The review covers Excurio's Egyptology-backed Khufu pyramid walk-through and its 1874 Paris Impressionist piece, with notes on pacing, ambition, and educational depth. Read more...

Southbank Centre will host the UK premiere of Playing With Fire: An Immersive Odyssey with Yuja Wang on May 21, a mixed-reality experience funded by VIVE Arts, the cultural arm of LEXRA Board member HTC, that places audiences inside a performance by the classical pianist. Read more...

Tin Drum's mixed reality concert featuring volumetric-captured performances by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto runs June 27 to October 12, 2026 at VS. inside Grand Green Osaka, following runs in New York, London, Singapore, and other cities. The expanded Osaka edition adds archival exhibitions and a limited-edition vinyl for premium ticket holders. Read more...

Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson has broken ground on G-Dome, a dome-style immersive entertainment venue and green space at Spring and Travis in Houston. The project enters the dome-format venue category alongside Sphere and Cosm. Read more...

The Black Mirror Experience arrives at The Shed in Hudson Yards on June 20 for a limited run through September, opening concurrently with a Madrid engagement at Espacio Delicias and following its Montreal debut at Infinity Experience earlier this year. Read more...

Sphere Entertainment has passed $400 million in ticket sales for its Wizard of Oz immersive production at the Las Vegas venue and has announced a new title to follow, extending its content rotation strategy for the large-format destination format. Read more...

Sony Pictures Entertainment is leading Cosm's Series C round with a $100 million investment, taking a minority stake and a board seat for SPE CEO Ravi Ahuja. Cosm's film programming to date has been Warner Bros. library titles like The Matrix and Harry Potter. Read more...

LEXRA member Wevr has partnered with LEXRA Board member HTC's VIVERSE platform and the Taiwan Ministry of Culture to relaunch The Blu, a decade-old VR storytelling staple previously adapted for Dreamscape Immersive, as a large-scale free-roam experience. Read more...

Delaware North has partnered with Orlando-based MDSX to launch "Above the Roar," a virtual reality experience at Niagara Falls State Park that gives visitors an aerial and immersive perspective on the falls alongside the traditional in-person attractions. Read more...

Blooming Park ran May 15-17, 2026 at Grand Green Osaka Umeda Park, letting up to 30 concurrent visitors use Meta Quest 3S headsets and hand tracking to explore MR content tied to the site's past as a cemetery, freight terminal, and ancient seabed. Admission was free. Read more...

DreamVR has unveiled The Rifted Skies, a VR parkour roguelite launching in Early Access this fall on Meta Quest and SteamVR, with a LEXRA member PICO version in development. The studio is applying arm-swing locomotion, popularized by Gorilla Tag, and movement design from its location-based VR background. Read more...

STUDIOCANAL, the studio behind recent LBE deals including the Terminator partnership with Hero Zone, has appointed IMG Licensing to manage its location-based entertainment and experiences rights, covering a catalog spanning animation, horror, thriller, and family genres. Read more...

Qualcomm has announced its next flagship XR chipset with a 160% increase in Neural Processing Unit performance and an expanded visual analytics unit for machine vision, alongside incremental gains in GPU cooling and RAM support. The chipset targets the next generation of standalone headsets. Read more...

US federal authorities have charged a North Carolina man with orchestrating a scheme to fraudulently obtain hundreds of millions of shares, with prosecutors alleging the money behind Infinite Reality's headline-grabbing $3 billion valuation, which included its Napster acquisition, never actually existed. Read more...

Google Search Trends Show Breakout of Searches for VR Near Me

I stopped giving any credence to research reports forecasting growth of the VR market about five years ago. Now I look for signals, and there’s a new one that’s holding steady for half a year now. And it’s something that every FEC and arcade should pay attention to. (Even if you’re still bitching about your headset cables breaking.)

Google searches for “VR Near Me” have grown 6X since the beginning of this year. It’s a clear signal that interest in location-based VR experiences is increasing rapidly. We’ve been documenting the growth of venues in this newsletter for several years now. Looks like consumer demand is growing too.

The 2024 Immersive Audience Report showed that consumers who experienced location-based VR were willing to pay up to 4X more than they actually paid. So it only makes sense that the more people who experience the new, high-quality VR attractions out there, the more people will be searching for the next one. Unfortunately, getting people to buy that first ticket remains a challenge. Which is why that will be one of the major focuses at the upcoming LEXRA Summit coming Oct 6-7 in Dallas (yes, new dates and city).

Gen Alpha could be the driver. Kids born since 2010 (16 and under now) and to millennial parents are driving at-home VR use. Peer-reviewed research shows 47% of kids use Social VR at least bi-weekly and 29% at least weekly. That’s sticky, recurring usage. This growth is primarily driven by the smash-hit Gorilla Tag on Quest, the Fortnite of VR (btw, Fortnite play is collapsing).

The other search term that’s broken out is VR Birthday Party, which is up 11X. Gen A represents pretty much the entire birthday party market. They’re in love with VR. Searches for VR Birthday Party are up 11X. Do I need to spell it out more clearly?

If you want video evidence, check out this video from Gorilla Tags first GorillaCon. They held it last week during VidCon in Anaheim, the largest conference in the US for content creators. Thousands of kids and their parents dropped $200 per person to celebrate their favorite Gorilla Tag creators.

Look at that audience, and then realize that every single one of them is passionate about playing with their friends in VR. And when you’re ready to learn how to give them what they’re looking for, you have three options.

Stay immersed,

Bob

PS: If you are an operator, this video shows you how to launch any new content like a movie premiere. Generate excitement, earned media, and drive repeat visits. If you’re a supplier, this is the marketing support that venues need to promote and launch your content.