PeriscapeVR premiered June 14, the first Virtual Reality (VR) Experience Center of its kind to launch in an airport, in Terminal 4 at John F. Kennedy International Airport – one of the world’s most active air terminals. Featuring curated virtual reality, the six-month pop-up will provide more than 70,000 daily passengers with immersive entertainment experiences to enjoy while traveling. PeriscapeVR offers incredible virtual and mixed reality experiences in an easy-to-use, luxurious design that is approachable for the VR curious, adventurous and experienced users.
Combining expertise in luxury, tech, retail, and curated with original content, PeriscapeVR’s Experience Center is located in Terminal 4’s Retail Lounge and features freestanding VR Towers with 12 stations designed specifically with travelers’ security, awareness, and outstanding customer experience in mind. With pricing ranging from $1 - $2 per minute and experiences averaging approximately 5 -10 minutes each, the experience center is a scalable installation that brings a luxurious and accessible entertainment option to mass audiences in high-profile locations anywhere.
“We are thrilled to partner with PeriscapeVR to bring the first airport VR Experience Center offering location-based entertainment to travelers at Terminal 4,” said Edward Midgley, vice president of commercial for JFKIAT, the company that manages Terminal 4. “With more than 21 million annual passengers traveling across six continents, Terminal 4 is the perfect location to offer this amenity. T4 strives to provide passengers with the best experiences possible and PeriscapeVR will give travelers something new to enjoy while at the airport.”
The widely appealing experiences are grouped into five distinct content categories: “First Time”; “Experience”; “Create”; “Play”; and “Cause” and feature exclusive, best-of-class content from some of the most respected brands in virtual reality. The experiences have been carefully curated to appeal to a wide variety of air travelers and will instantly transport them to exotic destinations, and allow them to draw and create in 3D, personify a famous musician, play incredibly fun games, and more.
- First Time: theBlu: Whale Encounter, Reef Migration and Luminous Abyss – An undersea encounter with the largest species on earth, witness the magnificence of an undersea migration on the edge of a coral reef, venture into the deepest region of the ocean to discover the iridescent abyss.
- Experience: Irrational Exuberance – Journey to imaginary worlds as a lone explorer in deep space. Transport to beautiful, mysterious, and incredible worlds. Discover and interact with deep space phenomena with worlds of wildly different sensations, interactions, and impossible vistas.
- Create: MasterpieceVR: Shape your Creativity – Build tangible objects, colorful environments, and high-quality 3D models with VR’s most powerful sculpting & painting tool
- Play: Fruit Ninja and AudioShield – Fruit Ninja VR takes squishy, satisfying gameplay and turns it into a virtual reality experience that can be enjoyed by players of all ages and skill levels. Step into the Fruit Ninja universe and tackle fruit from all angles – slice, juggle, and skewer fruit in virtual reality – just don’t hit the bombs. AudioShield brings musical favorites to life, putting participants at the point of impact of every beat in a song. Surf and interact with music in a new, physical way, using shields to block incoming orbs.
- Social Cause: Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness – A magical and mesmerizing VR journey into the foreign land of the sightless. Based on John Hull's sensory and psychological experience of blindness, the interactive experience uses binaural audio and real-time 3D animations to create a fully immersive journey through a “world beyond sight.”
"PeriscapeVR, meaning ‘escape within,’ was created for travelers who desire a fun, blissful and euphoric respite from airport crowds and long hours between flights. As a frequent traveler, I recognized there was a gap in the market for this kind of airport entertainment, and I am delighted to be bringing PeriscapeVR to JFK T4,” said Lynn Rosenthal, founder and CEO of PeriscapeVR.
Paradies Lagardère, Terminal 4’s travel retail group has partnered with PeriscapeVR to be the first airport retail group to offer virtual reality location-based entertainment. The VR Experience Center features state-of-the art HP Windows Mixed Reality Headsets for seamless immersion into virtual worlds, as well as HP Z240 Tower Workstations to provide the required performance for immersive VR experiences. The center also features a world-class luxury design by the renowned Gensler Architects.
“HP is proud to have been chosen to power the virtual reality technology needs of PeriscapeVR for its groundbreaking experience at one of the world’s most visited airports,” said Joanna Popper, Global Head of Virtual Reality, Location Based Entertainment, HP. “We are thrilled to offer travelers the innovation, creativity and escape of virtual reality, and excited that they will experience this content through HP’s technology. We look forward to making this the first huge success of many together with the PeriscapeVR team.”
PeriscapeVR’s debut of its innovative experience center aligns with HP’s fundamental commitment to product innovation and the ability to make VR more accessible than ever. HP’s versatile, high-powered PC solutions deliver fully immersive user experiences, empowering customers to create and consume VR content. Furthermore, the company’s enterprise-grade products are designed for critical applications that require high levels of security, manageability, reliability and ISV certified applications.
In an environment as dynamic as an airport, it is vital that the design has the ability to adapt to conditions that can shift significantly at a moment’s notice. Gensler’s design for the VR centers places an emphasis on ease of use and flexibility to adapt to various environments, core components of its luxury design. With every project, the design firm strives to achieve a true collaboration as well as an expression of how design addresses the opportunities of placemaking.
