‘Another Reality’ Launches Innovative Kickstarter Campaign to Open an Interactive Arcade for Playing
Founders of Another Reality, a social high-tech entertainment center located in Toronto, have launched a Kickstarter campaign that will allow backers to not only play games and enter tournaments, but also learn more about game development, content creation and receive valuable experience in innovation.
Another Reality Founders Paul Rock, David Zhang and Brian Yi are currently working with local Canadian colleges and non-profit agencies on a quest to create a weekday program offered during after-school/after-business hours called ARcademy – a play-on-words for ‘another reality’ and ‘academy.’
“We are proud Sheridan College is partnering with Another Reality to offer an opportunity to provide a state-of-the-art perspective and opportunities for our students to understand how a game’s commercial venture is organized and launched,” said Jose Rueda, professor of game design at The Faculty of Animation, Arts and Design (FAAD) – part of Sheridan College and Canada’s largest art school. “Students have direct communication to the executives and their associates, which is potentially a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be close to the start of a new venture. Another Reality is looking how to best leverage and go beyond the technology to provide a unique context and experience to their clients, which is very valuable for our students.”
Other partners for ARcademy include Holodeck, Laura Hall, Tranzient, Five Tiers, 3rius, TribeXR, YDreams, Battleverse, Beam, Nick Fox-Gieg, The Hive, Twitch Toronto and Entertainment One. They are also partnering with Battleverse, Ydreams, Amuka Capital on an Arena Program, focused on virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) focused eSports.
In addition to workshops and game playing, ARcademy plans to host tournaments with prizes, with a Global Tilt Brush ARt Tournament already planned for 2020 in partnership with AWE (Augmented World Expo), the largest trade conference for the VR and AR industry.
“We immediately connected with the idea of getting people away from their computers and creating together in a spatial world. On top of the creativity and community building, the tournament supports local VR vendors, and AWE has always been a home to start-ups and tech giants alike,” said Ori Inbar, Co-Founder, AWE and Super Ventures. “We know that XR won’t reach its full potential unless all kinds of people, including women and other underrepresented groups, are exposed to the tech. This is a great way to do that.”
“By supporting our crowdfunding campaign, you can learn how to become an inventor with Nintendo Labo and also learn to become a game developer or content creator while experiencing innovation that’s rarely accessible to the general public,” Rock said. “Our goal is to turn an 8,500-square-foot building into an innovation hub where people get to experience products shaping our future and learn about content creation. We want to inspire children and parents to create amazing gadgets using Nintendo Labo. We believe everyone can come here to be a content creator.”
Rock adds that even if backers are not located in Toronto, they can still experience the wonders taking place at ARcademy. Backers will also have the opportunity to have their name featured on a billboard in Times Square through Five Tiers.
“We will broadcast workshops at ARcademy online and if you or your company has a prototype you would like to get out to the public, we can showcase it at our center,” he said.
The team says its goal is to design their brick-and-mortar location as a makerspace focused on VR/AR, game development and gadget creation – where makers are regular people and not engineers. Also, they want to integrate ‘Edutainment’ that were created outside Canada, were developed in foreign languages or have been shut down.
“For example, Nintendo had a classroom program on Labo operated by a non-profit agency, The Institute of Play, that is shutting down this year,” Yi said. “As a result, there is less access for people to learn game design. Also, while most classes on game design are just for mobile type games or iPad games, we’re focused on games designed for out-of-home.”
For more information, or to back the team, visit the ARcademy Campaign Page on Kickstarter.
