Hands-on with Nomadic's VR experience, which uses rooms and real-world objects to immerse the user; the firm hopes its experiences will be available Q4 2017
in VR Lucas Matney / TechCrunch : Nomadic wants to bring VR you can feel to your local movie theater Janko Roettgers / Variety : Virtual Reality You Can Touch: Nomadic Wants to Bring VR Experiences to Malls, Movie Theaters Tweets: Janko Roettgers / @jank0 : Also super interesting: the business model behind it. Nomadic wants to build modular VR sets for malls & movie theaters.
Context & Ripple Effects
Nomadic is betting that VR's missing ingredient is physicality: instead of a headset-only experience, it builds modular sets with real rooms and objects that players can touch, designed to drop into malls and movie theaters with a Q4 2017 availability target. The business model Janko Roettgers flagged — renting modular VR sets to venues rather than selling content — makes the theater chain, not the consumer, the customer.
That venue-first bet reads differently two years later: Cinemark and AMC went on to test high-end, immersive multiplayer VR in select theaters (theater-chain VR pilots), suggesting Nomadic was early to a location-based entertainment wave the big exhibitors eventually validated.
First-order effects
- Mall and theater operators gain a turnkey way to monetize square footage between showtimes, with Nomadic supplying both the physical set and the experience rather than venues building their own.
- Nomadic's Q4 2017 timeline puts pressure on the company to sign venue partners now, since each modular set requires floor space commitments before revenue can start.
Second-order effects
- Exhibitors choosing between Nomadic's modular sets and the bespoke high-end multiplayer installations Cinemark and AMC later trialed will force a pricing comparison: cheap replicable rooms versus premium one-off builds.
- At-home alternatives sharpen the contrast — WEVR's Netflix-style subscription for cinematic VR serves the couch-bound viewer, so location-based players must justify the trip with touch and social presence home setups can't match.
Third-order effects
- If the theater-chain pilots keep expanding, cinemas drift toward mixed-use entertainment venues where premium interactive experiences subsidize declining film attendance — a structural split between out-of-home VR built on physical sets and the standalone headset market Leap Motion's hand-tracking work targets.
- A modular-set rental model, if it works, turns VR content into a facilities business: whoever controls the standardized room format controls how fast experiences propagate across chains.
The trend: Location-based VR is pulling physical, touchable experiences into malls and theaters as a premium out-of-home tier that evolves separately from consumer headsets.