How Immersive Gameboxes Could Become the Future of Entertainment

What if you could create a fun collaborative experience in a way that gets people out of their houses, off the Internet and into spending time together IRL? That's the vision behind the Immersive Gamebox, a company and entertainment experience created by Tough Mudder obstacle course founder Will Dean. The idea is that these interactive box-spaces feature physical games that groups can play together and the "boxes" can be set up in all sorts of areas including shopping malls, theaters, cruise ships and gyms.

The most futuristic part of this story, though, is how they can be staffed. The entire space can be controlled by a remotely located team. This means their ability to scale isn't constrained by where they put the experience. Eventually, the company will franchise these "theme parks in a box" to other entrepreneurs and the vision is to have hundreds of them across the world by the end of the year. Can the Immersive Gamebox take over the world of entertainment? It will depend on the quality of the games and how memorable of an experience they can create.

The reason theaters still work is because there is a steady stream of blockbuster movies (which the theaters don't produce themselves). They benefit from the abundance of stories coming from Hollywood. For interactive experiences like the Immersive Gamebox to succeed, they will probably need a similar engine of great experiences to fuel their growth too.