While EXA SetiaWalk Outpost will only be officially open for visitors this weekend, the company is already looking up ahead. In fact, really far ahead based on the presentation by EXA Global’s CEO, Richard Lee during SetiaWalk Outpost’s launch event yesterday.
As mentioned before, its newly launched virtual reality (VR) center in Puchong which offers multiplayer free roaming VR experience is just the first of several outlets that EXA Global is planning to open throughout the world. Among future locations that the company is already looking at include North America, Europe, Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, Australia, and countries surrounding Malaysia.
For starters, the company already laid the foundation to enter Pakistan as well as Shenzhen, China. Meanwhile, there is a good reason why its first outlet in SetiaWalk Puchong is named as such: Outpost is actually a term that the company used to classify its smaller VR centers. In general, an EXA Outpost is designed to cater to less than 200 people per day with the EXA SetiaWalk Outpost itself is able to support 170 patrons in a day.
According to Richard, the company is planning to open bigger venues in future which it refers to as flagship centers with sizes that range between 10,000 square feet to as big as a football field. These flagship locations will apparently be able to cater up to 900 visitors per day.
EXA Global vision for its future doesn’t stop at expanding its footprint on global scale. The company is actually already planning to upgrade its VR hardware even though it is already using unthethered setup in EXA SetiaWalk Outpost. In the near future, EXA Global is looking to have full body suit with haptic feedback that is mapped according to traditional Chinese acupuncture points.
Alongside the suit, EXA Global is also planning to include VR glove, and augmented reality wristband into its setup. The company has also shared several renderings of its future headset and gun that are being developed with the help of its technology partner, Dutajaya Media which shared the same parent company as per EXA Global.
Furthermore, EXA Global is also looking to have a full open world VR with randomly generated levels and fully interactive environment. For the time being though, the company is in the midst of developing a smartphone app that customers can use to create and save their VR avatars as well as keep track of their activities throughout EXA’s VR centers in any given locations.
Given the current boom of e-sports at the moment, we not surprised that EXA Global is also working to deliver similar player-vs-player (PvP) experience at its VR centers very soon. In fact, the concept visual that was presented to the audience at SetiaWalk Outpost’s launch event pretty much depict an e-sports stadium environment.
Frankly speaking, all the plans above seem quite ambitious to say the least especially given the infancy of VR industry in Malaysia and the unproven level of acceptance for the technology among local consumers. Nevertheless, we definitely looking forward to see EXA Global turning all of its plans into reality in the near future.
