Europa-Park ventures even further into virtual reality

With "Yullbe", the Europapark amusement park near the Swiss border is opening a completely new experience. The operators hope that the technology will one day be used all over the world.

Virtual Reality Glasses on Rollercoasterthat was yesterday and it still is today. Now the Europa Park theme park is taking a step further into the future. Europa-Park's newest attraction is a new experience in many respects. While in the previous park real worlds were developed down to the last detail, the reality of "Yullbe" was created on the computer: it is a virtual reality experience that takes visitors through adventurous sceneries.

 World's most powerful free roaming virtual reality project to date

You walk along terrifying cliffs and over vertically rotating bridges. In fact, the visitor is in a bare, 250-square-metre room, monitored by 90 cameras and countless sensors. The tour through the virtual world feels so real, however, that one is on wobbly feet. Special haptic experiences have been built into the experience. For example, a kind of railing that is a stately wall in the virtual world. Such elements are meant to give visitors a sense of security.

With the virtual reality project "Yullbe", the amusement park is entering new territory. According to its own information, it is the world's most powerful free-roaming virtual reality project to date. Up to 32 people can be "tracked" simultaneously, eight at a time in each world. Because of Corona, however, the park only sends four people together through the half-hour excursion at the beginning. In the best case, in the post-Corona period, 48 people per hour can go on a virtual discovery tour - a very small number by Europa-Park standards.

Short break destination to destination

The new attraction, which is located outside the theme park directly next to the "Rulantica" water world that opened last year, is thus not aimed at the normal day visitors to the theme park at all. Rather, the company is continuing its efforts to become a "short-holiday destination", as Dieter Borer, Europa-Park's Swiss representative, calls it. Visitors are expected to stay for several days and stay overnight in the park's own hotels.

If you want to transform yourself into a kind of "Iron Man" for half an hour in "Yullbe", which is a lot of fun, you have to pay 29 euros. The reason for the steep price is the high cost. The technology alone, which is in the helmet and backpack and the transmitters on the wrists and ankles, costs around 15,000 euros per visitor.

Europa-Park is not making big money with the attraction on site. But that is not the goal at all. Rather, the attraction is an experimental field to advance into a new market. Developer Thomas Wagner, co-founder of the company VR Coaster, speaks of a "huge market". In the future, the technology will be sold to amusement parks all over the world, but also to shopping centres or museums, for example. Interested parties have to pay around one million euros for the technology. The production of the virtual world will then cost even more. In the future, excursions into the world of dinosaurs in potent natural history museums, experienceable history or simply entertaining adventures in fantasy universes are imaginable. What form "Yullbe" will take in the future is still unclear. The current project at Europa-Park is initially scheduled to run for three years.

Source: bazonline