“Wear AR glasses and visit Happy Valley, and you will be the coolest guy in the whole park.”

The annual Happy Valley Halloween season is back, and unlike previous years, Happy Valley, a theme park brand under the Overseas Chinese Town Group, has partnered with Pacific Future Technology to create a unique Halloween carnival: the Shenzhen Happy Valley AR Fashion Festival. Seven AR-themed zones feature AR experiences based on IPs like "A Chinese Ghost Story AR" and "Identity V: Madhouse," along with a host of other thrilling and exciting content tailored to the Halloween season.

As China's first large-scale AR project targeting the consumer market, the project reportedly involved 2,000 AR glasses, covering 350,000 square meters of the park. Within half an hour of the night show opening, all tickets for the AR glasses experience package were sold out.

Happy Valley Fashion Festival introduces AR experience: China's first large-scale application of AR glasses

As early as May 17, during the 15th Cultural Expo, Pacific Future Technology signed a strategic cooperation agreement with OCT Happy Valley Group at the Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Center, combining technology + consumption to comprehensively explore and create new consumption scenarios in Happy Valley Group's businesses.

Chang Sheng, deputy general manager of OCT Happy Valley Group, and Li Jianyi, CEO of Pacific Future Technology, attended the signing ceremony. Chen Wenxian, deputy director of the Electronic Information Department of the Municipal Science and Technology Commission, Guo Yongqiang, representative of the Culture, Radio, Television, Tourism and Sports Bureau, Ren Peiwen, COO of Youmi Tianxia, and Wu London, director of Pacific Future Technology, witnessed the successful signing of the event.

On October 11, the Shenzhen Happy Valley AR Trendy Play Festival was officially launched. The theme festival will last for a month until November 17.

As China's first independently innovative theme park chain, Happy Valley has consistently been at the forefront of enhancing the consumer experience. The introduction of Pacific Future Technology's AR experience, combining technology with consumption, is a prime example of this, comprehensively exploring and creating new consumer scenarios within the Happy Valley Group's businesses, allowing users to experience unprecedented and fresh experiences. Backed by hundreds of billions of yuan in resources from OCT, Happy Valley also possesses unparalleled advantages. By its 20th anniversary, Happy Valley had already received over 180 million visitors, making it the most visited Chinese theme park brand. Last year's Fashion Festival night session attracted approximately 350,000 visitors, with a peak attendance of 47,000.

On the other hand, the partner Pacific Future Technology, as a technology-based AR hardware startup, has been deeply engaged in the cultural tourism field. Its first-generation AR glasses products have been used in many tourist areas such as the Malacca Scenic Area in Malaysia and OCT Liuzhou Kale Planet.

Happy Valley's full entry into AR also marks that domestic theme parks are about to enter a new stage in consumption patterns and content.

Seven AR theme areas, IP content experience attracts users

Upon entering Happy Valley, a large exchange counter for AR glasses appeared before our eyes. Currently, the AR experience is only available at night, but we've heard that players are already arriving around 4 or 5 PM to inquire about the features and experiences of the AR glasses. By 6 PM, the exchange counter was already bustling with people, and the AR glasses packages sold out in just half an hour.

The seven AR theme areas are Demon Realm, Three Realms Adventure Mountain, Trendy Play Campus, Westworld, Sunset Unlucky Street, Valley Secret Realm, and Trendy Play Black Market.

Each themed area offers its own unique gaming experience, such as the Demon Realm Castle in Demon Realm, the escape from the death penalty prison in Deserted Island Strange Stories in Valley Secret Realm, and the Tomb of the Tomb in Three Realms Adventure Mountain.

The two major AR trendy play spaces include AR Orphanage Ghost Stories and AR New Ghost Story.

Several areas of the park utilize well-known IP content. At a time when user awareness of AR technology is limited, IP has the effect of attracting users' attention and lowering the barrier to adoption of the new technology. The horror-themed park, with its combination of lighting and sound effects and AR technology, elevates the thrill level even further.

A full-day ticket to the Happy Valley Fashion Festival costs 230 yuan, while a nighttime ticket is 99 yuan and a special offer is 39.9 yuan. The AR glasses alone cost 160 yuan (only available at nighttime), while the AR experience package costs 199 yuan.

How is the Happy Valley AR experience?

From exchanging equipment to teaching and getting started, it can be completed within 10 minutes. Scan the QR code on site and use the mini program to bind the glasses, then you can view the layout of the major experience areas in the park, including AR glasses return points, AR service stations, battery replacement points, etc. (the mobile mini program is equipped with map and other functions).

This experience involved Pacific Future Technology's second-generation AR glasses, am Glass. These glasses have a high-tech look and resemble sunglasses. To accommodate a wider range of head shapes and ensure a more stable fit, the temples have been adjusted to tighten more inward and feature an adjustable retractable strap. The nose pads are detachable, allowing users who wear glasses to place the AR glasses over their glasses.

The AR glasses adopt a split design, so the overall weight is lighter. They are connected to the processing unit using a USB-C cable. When experiencing, the processing unit is placed in a waist bag and carried with you.

As visitors explore the seven scenic areas, the device will identify their location and automatically display relevant content. For example, in the Western theme park, characters like the Chainsaw Killer, Ghost Rider, and Skeleton Man appear on the AR glasses; while in the trendy campus area, characters from urban legends like Sadako and the Headless Man appear. Furthermore, cosplayers are present in nearly every area of the park, and some themed experience areas feature real-life NPCs, blending the real and the virtual to create a thrilling and exciting experience for players.

Among them, the most recommended ones are AR Orphanage Tales, Tomb Raider, Deserted Island Tales, Skull Island, AR A Chinese Ghost Story, Hide and Seek, and other horror experience halls.

Currently, all AR content is purely experience-oriented and does not require handles or gestures for interaction. However, in order to make the virtual content merge with reality and look more realistic, the glasses have Slam positioning turned on throughout the process, so you can see that the character seems to be really standing on the ground in front of you.

According to Pacific Future Technology CEO Li Jianyi, the device is still in the adaptation period and will gradually launch more AR content experiences in the future, including a virtual and real content with interaction.

The key to unlocking the AR C-end consumer market

While several consumer-focused AR glasses were officially released in 2019, their real-world adoption in the consumer market has only just begun. The launch of the OCT Happy Valley AR project has played a significant role in both exploring offline entertainment formats and promoting the development of the AR industry. This marks the first large-scale application of AR glasses in the consumer market in China, and indeed globally.

According to Li Jianyi, 2,000 amglass AR glasses will be installed in this project. In addition to Shenzhen Happy Valley, Beijing Happy Valley has also added AR experience.

In recent years, the integration of technology and cultural tourism has become mainstream, with technologies like VR, AR, holographic projection, and interactive projection all being applied to the traditional tourism industry. Compared to traditional tourism, AR combined with theme parks not only offers a stronger sense of immersion and interactivity, but also encourages users to be more proactive out of curiosity.

The launch of Happy Valley AR has also brought many positive impacts:

1. The cooperation between the two parties has allowed the market to see the possibility and potential of large-scale implementation of AR glasses in offline scenarios. Following Happy Valley, other offline theme park brands may also usher in a wave of AR craze.

2. Scaling up the supply chain. Currently, the difficulty of mass-producing AR hardware is one of the biggest challenges facing the entire industry. This is primarily due to the lack of scale in market demand, fragmented supply chains, and the limited number of factories capable of producing AR glasses, which lacks a systematic approach. This ultimately leads to low production capacity and high prices.

3. Improved AR content quality. The chicken-and-egg problem is a vicious cycle between content and hardware. The B2B2C model of cultural tourism can quickly reach a large number of C-end users. User feedback from C-end users will also force improvements in content quality. After all, it is the consumers who ultimately pay the bill.

4. Overall improvement in AR awareness. Of course, the current experience still has many issues, such as comfort, heat generation, battery life, SLAM stability in complex on-site environments, and interactive content design. The Happy Valley AR project is like a key to consumer-end AR glasses, but whether it can unlock more surprises still requires technological advancement and time to prove.

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Xvisio Technology (Xvisio Technology) is a computer vision company engaged in the development of underlying technologies for spatial perception and cognition (vSLAM+AI). It focuses on providing high-speed (100fps) end-to-end vSLAM solutions for AR/VR/MR, robotics, AGV and other fields, including high-precision position tracking, navigation, obstacle avoidance and object recognition.

Founded in Silicon Valley in 2016, Xvisio Technology received angel investment in 2017, led by China Science and Technology Star, and now has subsidiaries in the US and Europe. The company's founding team, comprised of core management from leading industry companies, has a long history of entrepreneurial experience, boasts 10 R&D PhDs, and boasts over 50 man-years of industry-leading research. Xvisio Technology is an Intel Movidius licensee and solution partner.