Your portal to VR is already in your pocket

A career in communications for hundreds of brands across various industries has taught me that if you take care of your customers, they will take care of the marketing. This is especially true in the world of virtual reality where the experience is not yet normalized nor really understood. Accordingly, personal testimonials and demos from friends is a primary way the format is growing. This steady build is happening as the technology quickly becomes better, lighter, and more affordable. In an era when we’re all still so spread out physically and the idea of putting something on your face that’s been on someone else’s face is still… off-putting, the entire industry is asking itself how to appeal to even more people.?

Setting aside the historically nerdy connotation of virtual reality equipment, there are some great, freestanding (no cables) options today that are both comfortable and readily available. Meta, Sony, Apple, and PICO each have headsets from $250—up to $3,500—that are simple to set up and have a variety of apps available to suit any taste. But in the big scheme of things, $250 plus the unfamiliarity of VR present fairly formidable barriers for a lot of folks who may already have a phone, a smartwatch, a tablet, a computer, and a smart TV as well as gaming consoles.?

VR hardware market growth year over year is generally projected at between 11 and 14 percent, which is healthy and sustainable, but doesn’t provide an iPod or iPhone moment in the near future where there’s a triple digit increase in the user base any time in the next few years. This means that developers need a sizable share of the existing active user base as well as a very high retention rate combined with ongoing revenue streams to sustain operations. But even once you have most of those active VR users engaged, how do you grow if the user base is only increasing by a dozen percent annually??

Broadly, we know that social play is a huge factor in player retention and growth since people love to hang out with people they know. And that social adhesion with personal invitations and weekly meet-ups in game keep people’s headsets charged, updated, and in used. But, at some point, there are friends, family, and colleagues unwilling or unable to make the VR leap. So that demands that the barriers to entry be lowered.?

We’ve thought a lot about this at Mighty Coconut, the 100% independent entertainment studio behind Walkabout Mini Golf, the best rated multiplayer experience in VR globally and a title with one of the highest retention rates in the industry. It is pretty clear to us that advertising our way in front of people who might like to buy a VR headset doesn’t make tactical nor financial sense. Large scale demoing is also not feasible without a national retail footprint nor deployed fleet of headsets. With a finite number of people with headsets and usually only one in their home, we ask ourselves how do we sustain and grow a community—and a business?

The “aha moment” came when we realized that the Venn diagram of ‘player wish fulfillment’ and ‘growth potential’ were two largely overlapping circles. Our community wants to be able to easily play with more people they care about and they have a natural impulse to tell people about the virtual reality experiences they love. That’s why we’ve been hard at work making the first fully cross-playable, portal into immersive worlds via the device people already have: their phone.?

By innovating a new golfing interaction method we call “Swing-to-Putt” as well as a novel implementation of “Touch-to-Putt” as well as picture-in-picture views to help with peripheral views, we’ve created Walkabout Mini Golf: Pocket Edition so that our players can show people in their lives and invite them to join using the iPhone or iPad they already have access to. It’s a rectangular, 360° viewable window into dozens of themed worlds where they can play, explore, compete, or just hang out. This puts Pocket Edition players on near-equal footing with VR players, giving both an easy way to connect, participate, and enjoy.?

Over the past few years, we’ve been touched by stories of parents re-connecting with their adult children, people meeting and falling in love, strangers striking up friendships and making new weekly game night traditions, and even colleagues holding remote outings and meetings in Walkabout. This is precisely why we created Pocket Edition and why we engineered in so much power into a ‘mobile’ game. Not because we had to but because we believe that is the best way to delight our players and the people they invite in. Players love to teach each other and show friends around, so a stripped down version wouldn’t be fun to share.?

Will it sell more VR headsets? We certainly hope and expect that it will. But that’s not the point. Our goal is to help our players enjoy time with the people they enjoy. Whether they play on their phone or in VR is up to them and our guess is that it will come down to personal preferences. Our role is to help them participate whether they are sitting on a train, swinging their phone in their office or a park, or dialing in their putts in VR. The wish is that they get in on the fun in a way that works for them.

The larger hope is that this set of innovations and use case will influence how players share their experience and how other VR developers imagine access to their games. We can’t wait to let colleagues in on how this affects player behavior, conversion, and… of course… fun.

David Wyatt is the head of communications & business strategy for Mighty Coconut. He’s worked with hundreds of brands including Meta, Google, Apple, Meta, Sony, PICO XR, The Jim Henson Company, Aardman, Meow Wolf, Exploding Kittens, UNESCO, Japan, City of Marfa, LBJ Presidential Library, EVRI, Planned Parenthood, and the National Domestic Violence Hotline.