South Korea’s ‘Vaunce Super Park’ Looks to HOLOGATE to Give Them an Edge.
Why HOLOGATE?
When it comes to children’s play, leisure, and indoor sports theme parks in South Korea, there’s a very small market, which means that competition is tight, and owners must be open to discovering and implementing global industry standards to set their locations apart from their local competitors. Unlike other countries where there is plenty of competition, Vaunce Super Park in Suwon South Korea doesn’t have many examples within the country to benchmark new content, so they research the best parks in America and Europe looking for how much penetration a certain brand has and how much it is used.
“…it is very important for us to be open to the global industry news and understand what successful facilities are doing abroad. HOLOGATE was very attractive for us since successful facilities such as Two Bit Circus, and Urban Air are already using them.”
Operating a business with expensive content, Vaunce needs to choose carefully what they will put in their park. Seeing industry leaders adopt HOLOGATE early with success, Vaunce CEO Mr. Hojun Ryu strongly felt that having a HOLOGATE system in their parks before their competition had adopted the same technology would help them greatly.
“If the leaders of the industry are using HOLOGATE that means it sells, it makes money. That’s where we first became interested in HOLOGATE.”
Why now?
As with most location-based entertainment locations, Vaunce facilities are having a very hard time right now, in what they have described as a crisis. However, they are using this time to take a good position in the industry. They believe that the investments they are making now will be more valuable than future investments, particularly when people come back to leisure life, since it will make it easier to position as the number 1 location in South Korea if they start to establish that position now.
“We know that HOLOGATE is a new challenge for us but we believe that HOLOGATE will help us become the number 1 location in the country. Having a new system, the most successful system, in the biggest indoor park… we did our best to have the best of everything in our park, and having HOLOGATE is no exception.”
The new location
Vaunce’s new location, Vaunce Super Park, is located in Suwon City, the location of Samsung’s main office and factory, making this location their first park where the target audience is not children. Comprised of trampolines, a zip-coaster, ninja course, go-carts, climbing walls, and laser tag, VR was the obvious next addition for this park. While numbers are not great compared to pre-corona times, Vaunce Super Park’s adult-friendly attractions have been featured in the hit Asian tv show “Running Man” and have propelled them to be positioned at the top level of visitor numbers within this industry. According to Vaunce, HOLOGATE is playing a very important role in this success due to its user-friendly interface, and fun-for-everyone game library.
“HOLOGATE is always filled with users until closing time and is also helping us with our park’s return rate. People are coming back to enjoy the VR games in the HOLOGATE system.”
If the competition wasn’t tough enough, Vaunce Super Park is not the only play park in their building. But customers keep choosing and coming back to their Super Park in what Vaunce attributes to having trendy content like laser tag and HOLOGATE. Traditionally in South Korea, VR parks are built separately from indoor sports parks, but since Vaunce has both, their customers are getting the best of both worlds and heading home with memories of unmatched experiences.
Peerless support
In a first for HOLOGATE, the HOLOGATE ARENA in Vaunce Super Park Suwon was built with full remote support due to Covid-19 restrictions. At first, the team at Vaunce was worried about building the system by themselves. However, as they installed the system they found the setup to be simple, and the manual provided by HOLOGATE to be very detailed. On top of that, the support team at HOLOGATE was ready at all times to support them online, and when something wasn’t clear Vaunce received immediate answers to their questions.
A few of their favorite things
Vaunce believes the reason why some business owners are afraid to invest in VR is that they are afraid that the systems are easily broken. Vaunce admits that they had the same worries, but HOLOGATE has proven that this is not an issue.
“The materials and parts HOLOGATE uses in their systems are very good in terms of quality. They do not easily break. Hologate is also very agile in terms of customer service. If something is wrong with the hardware, they send replacement parts as soon as possible which arrives within a few days. For example, we needed an extra part for our HOLOGATE system and also a part for a system built in South Korea. We received the HOLOGATE part quicker than the South Korean part even though they are located on the opposite side of the globe.”
Fun for everyone
The team at Vaunce has their eyes on the future, and they believe that with enough HOLOGATE systems installed in South Korea the platform will be a very competitive and successful tool for supporting the future of eSports. As far as content goes, ZOMBYTE is king with adults while Simurai is the most popular with children, and for boys, it’s shooters like Rig Rebels, while the girls gravitate to Groove Guardians. In the future, Vaunce is looking forward to more horror games, and the addition of ARVI VR Escape rooms, two genres that are very popular in South Korea.
Into the future
Vaunce is confident that HOLOGATE is the future of location-based VR and has stated that if they are going to make another park for teens and adults that HOLOGATE will always be their first choice.
“If you are considering HOLOGATE, do not worry alone, consult with HOLOGATE, they will be very professional and deal with your questions with just facts. They are not going to lie or hide any facts from you to sell their products.”
Owen Lee of Vaunce
