DreamPark, Scaling Play in the Real World with Downloadable Theme Parks — Aidan Wolf

Aidan Wolf is the Co-Founder and CEO of DreamPark, a company reinventing the future of theme parks by bringing massive, multiplayer, mixed-reality experiences anywhere—malls, parks, or even your own backyard. 

With a background spanning games, social apps, and AR, Aidan and his team are proving that immersive play can spark joy, community, and real-world revitalization.

Key Takeaways:

• Downloadable Theme Parks: DreamPark turns any large space into a "downloadable" theme park—no physical props, just a handful of headsets and compelling digital worlds. Experiences range from whimsical coin-collecting adventures to wizard duels and mixed-reality races.
• Designing for Immersive Play: The magic is in the details: seamless onboarding (no headset straps), worlds that feel alive whether you’re observing or playing, and player-driven, non-linear exploration inspired by theme park and classic video game design.
• Serious Growth, Real Impact: From all-in bets like forgoing rent to buy more headsets, DreamPark landed a commercialization breakthrough with successful public tests, a Shark Tank appearance, enthusiastic VCs, and rapid expansion into malls and parks in Seattle, LA, and soon, Long Island.
• Community and Accessibility: DreamPark is on a mission to revitalize real communities—bringing families and kids to empty malls and parks and creating new opportunities for play, learning, and belonging in overlooked spaces.
• Lessons in Iteration: The team credits their success to relentless user testing, honest feedback, and learning from customer behaviors in live settings. DreamPark’s vision is about lowering barriers for both players and aspiring creators—the next goal is to let anyone build and launch their own DreamPark.

Aidan’s personal journey—from childhood world-builder to AR founder, to DreamPark CEO—shapes every product decision around creativity, accessibility, and the belief that play can transform both places and lives. 

With a growing suite of games and partners, DreamPark is shaping the future of spatial entertainment and the power of collective imagination.

About Aidan Wolf 

Aidan Wolf is the award-winning creator behind hit viral AR apps like DoodleLens, Blue Sky Paint, and RPG for Snap Spectacles and is now on a mission to make an Earth Worth Playing at DreamPark, the downloadable theme park company.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success.

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

Transcript

Nathan C: 0:00

Hello and welcome to The Tech Glow Up. I'm Nathan C and today I'm talking with Aidan Wolf, Co-Founder and CEO of DreamPark Aidan, it is so exciting to talk with you today! Thank you for joining me in your very busy schedule.

Aidan Wolf: 0:14

It's great to finally be able to do this! We've run into each other and talked so many times throughout the years, so you've seen many steps in the journey. So it would be great to talk to you today about DreamPark

Nathan C: 0:25

Heck yes! People in the world who have talked to me since June, know that DreamPark was one of my favorite experiences that I saw at Augmented World Expo. Could you introduce yourself and what is DreamPark

Aidan Wolf: 0:39

Yeah, absolutely! So I'm Aidan Wolf. I am Co-Founder of DreamPark I founded it with Kevin Habich and Brent Bushnell, my co-founders. It's an awesome team. My journey started in games. Which became social apps, which became augmented reality. And really my interest area is like how do we combine games, social apps, and augmented reality to make experiences that can bring people together? And I've been on that journey for probably a decade just trying to figure out, you know using all the latest technologies to create new experiences for people. And now we have these incredible consumer headsets. Like the Quest 3 that we're using that enable us to do truly immersive 3D augmented reality in the real world. And we're kind of right on the bleeding edge, cutting edge of that. And that's called DreamPark And it's a place, it's places you could visit today and play in mixed reality with hundreds of other people all in headsets at the same time. It is pretty new. I don't think there's really anything quite like it.

Nathan C: 1:44

When you introduce DreamPark to somebody for the first time, how do you explain it to them?

Aidan Wolf: 1:48

I'd say, we're creating downloadable theme parks. And what does that mean? Well, imagine if Disney World could show up in your own backyard. Or at the local mall. Or at the local park. Imagine having that fidelity of the MoMA or the best museum in the world available to you in whatever small town that you're in. And so that's really DreamPark. We're really figuring out what needs to be physical, what needs to be digital. But we're learning a lot of it can be digital and once it's there, it's something we can bring everywhere. So it's, it's kind of like giant games!

Nathan C: 2:22

So my experience at AWE opened my mind to a couple, like really interesting interactions and design decisions that you had to make. The game that I saw at AWE was very much like a kinda N64-type explorable world with bricks and, you know, magic boxes and funny little characters. And the world was placed inside of just a giant expo hall with like no markers, no set pieces, just a big open space. I put on the headset and the world is there and ready for me to explore. And just by like running around and tapping things with my hand, I can bop coins out of boxes. I can fight, villains. I can explore different things. And I found that I got so enmeshed in this world that I lost myself absolutely, completely in the real world. I didn't run into any person. But I actually did like run into a sign that had been like scooted into the play field accidentally. I was so enthralled in the video game. If you had looked at me, you know, I'd been wearing this headset, just like running around like a mad person. But it was so good. I like told five people as soon as I left, I was like, you have to go try! So I've seen the popups in some of the locations that you do, and it's gotta just be an automatic attractor, to see people running around with this technology totally enmeshed, it kind of sells itself if you're in the public view, right?

Aidan Wolf: 3:57

Yeah, that was one of the earliest insights we had while working on this. Because it actually started out of the Two Bit Circus arcade in LA. What we would do is wait till there was a full arcade night on like a Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And we'd head down there with our headsets, on trikes going on racetracks, you know, wizard battles, everything like that. And the people would just turn their heads and start staring and going, what's in that headset that we aren't seeing? It would just create a natural pull. And we realized it was like the boxiness of the headset itself. Which is usually seen as this big detractor was actually a great communication to the public. People who aren't quite familiar with VR, but they know what it looks like. They would see the headset and go like,"Oh, interesting. They're seeing something in there. I wanna try it out!" So that's what we witnessed on the promenade. That was our biggest kind of test case so far. That's thousands and thousands maybe, maybe more people in public, in a walking mall, outside in the sun with palm trees and everything, playing this game while other people are shopping and walking around them and eating ice cream cones. We don't have any boundaries. We don't have fences. It's not exclusive. It's just part of the mesh.

Nathan C: 5:05

If you don't really have like physical components that are part of this experience, can you really just sort of adjust your boundaries and sort of scale the world to fit?

Aidan Wolf: 5:17

That's the, what we're working towards.

Nathan C: 5:19

That's the direction? Love it!

Aidan Wolf: 5:20

That's the key, with what we'll have this year and what we're putting out will enable anyone to set up a DreamPark anywhere, any park, wherever. Even ticket for it. They could set it up for their friends, but they can also set it up as a business. And I think that'll be very,

Nathan C: 5:36

Oh goodness!

Aidan Wolf: 5:37

very interesting.

Nathan C: 5:38

You're in a very interesting moment, because you've just recently had some fantastic, good news and are kind of in a growth moment. Can you talk about what the last three to six months have been like for you?

Aidan Wolf: 5:53

It started with my co-founder and I, Kevin, deciding between money for rent or buying six Quest 3 headsets, and we ended up buying the Quest 3 headsets and sleeping on the couches at the arcade. Which, you know, sometimes you just have to, that's what you have to do. But it was that sense of like, we're all in. This is the thing we're gonna do and if this doesn't work, we're gonna do something else. So we very quickly built out what is Super Adventure, which is the game that you played at AWE, to get it out there on the promenade in Santa Monica. And luckily the Santa Monica advisory board was really into it! They were happy! It was like, hey you're bringing life to this part of the promenade that, that needed it. If you read our article in the Santa Monica local press, it's like, people are pretty enthused that this place that you know, has kind of sadly lost a lot of its life is being brought back to life by stuff like this. So that was that. We bought five headsets, and then that was all we had, and we would just be out there every day showing people the game, tweaking it, improving it, everything. It was just always in the you know, public facing experience for us. And then, we used that momentum to launch ourselves into Founders Inc. in San Francisco. They brought us in. It's an incubator with the possibility of investment. We kept the same mindset of we're all in, we have five headsets to our name and we're going to figure this out. And we wanted that investment and I think we, we showed up with that enthusiasm. We set up a DreamPark in the first three days at their office. So that was also the first test of like, could we bring this to another location and it works? Because at this point we're just manually moving stuff on screen hoping it lines up. And then that led to our first investment. I think it came down to the kids of our investor, Hubert coming, playing. Him seeing that it was like, oh they're not just playing it and like, it's been 15 minutes and then oh, it's been 30 minutes. Oh, it's almost an hour that they've been playing and needing to drag them out. I think these are the kind of moments that it was like, okay, maybe these guys are onto something with this thing, you know, if my kids are into it, so. In that moment we got the Shark Tank news that our episode was airing. By the way, you, you don't even know if your episode's gonna air once you filmed. So that went out. It was perfect timing for us because we just got this ball of momentum that we turned into a larger fundraise with Long Journey. And that's who's, who's on my hat! They're the coolest, they're very community oriented VC, I didn't even think that existed. And that inflow of cash has allowed us to experiment and do things that we didn't think was possible, which was this expansion now into multiple locations, building out our platform so that we can scale with this. And also developing out the content. So we have Super Adventure, which is that kind of like whimsical, you know, silly bad guys and black smashing lava pit jumping kind of game. But now we have Wizards on the way. That's gonna be you know, wands and runes and dragon battles. We have Power Force, which is a spaceport with bad guys and, and force powers, things like that. And a couple more games, we actually just released our first additional content, which is our Crash Course raceway. So that's over at Seattle. So people are on vehicles, real vehicles, like moving through a mixed reality racetrack, which is in insane. And it's working great! People are freaking out and they love it. We had a couple theories originally, which was, it actually came from one of my aunts, she was thinking about like real estate and she's like, well people own all this real estate, but it's empty. They don't do anything with it. You know, they're trying to lease it, but it, it just stays empty. And we're like, well you know our solution we don't have to drill into the walls, we don't have to hang stuff from the ceiling. There's no sensors or anything. We just show up with a box full of headsets. And we can set this up. Actually, we set up Seattle, our first like big location, it's a mall called West Canal Yards in Ballard. It's this giant mall. We were able to get it up and running in, I think my co-founder timed it, like 20 minutes! We were, we had it, we had it set up. Which is unbelievable! So if you think, like I just said it took us three days to set up a new location, which already felt pretty fast. And now we're basically to, you know, 20 minutes, an hour, and we could be running. So it's, it's kind of cool to see that progress.

Nathan C: 10:18

What a ride, for a year. Just to summarize, like starting with this bet, having to make a choice of do I choose the safe route or do I bet on this idea? And how you make that choice is a question we have to get into. But then, being able to, take that leap bet on yourself, invest enough to get a product out there. And then one of the things I love about how you show up in the world is when you're talking about cutting edge technologies, you have to show people. What they're getting into, you have to help them imagine what it's gonna be like. You have to like get them excited and about things that like, like you said, they've probably only ever heard about. And you do this fantastic job of being audacious with the headsets, showing up in public places. And it's just that right level of playful, you're showing off, but you're also like very accessible. You are like just this elegant example of showing what the magic of the technology can be. And then fast forward, you go from these moments of hardcore user testing and adaptation and learning to like everything starts to fall in line, right? Like Shark Tank's ready, they're ready to air, investors are ready. And now you're like growing multiple locations. And like honestly, if you're looking at mall spaces, Portland has an outrageous mall community that is developing that DreamPark would be perfect for!

Aidan Wolf: 12:00

I'd love to know more about that! Yeah.

Nathan C: 12:01

Oh my goodness! So, a lot of times, whether it's in technology, whether it's in startups or even creative, the joke is always, the overnight success that only took 10 years to make. It couldn't have been this easy the whole time. You've been exploring, connecting people with technology. Can you talk a little bit about how you got here and what were those learnings and moments that you look back on as being so foundational in your ability to meet this moment?

Aidan Wolf: 12:30

Yeah, to create any origin point, it would just be my own childhood. I was more like a kid who liked to draw and stay in his room and build worlds and do stuff like that. And you realize there's not amazing ways to like connect with other people when you have that type of mind. You know, and a lot of the, the stuff you draw is the way you talk and communicate. And, I early in my life, realized the way that I like to connect to people is through like the things that I imagine and come up with and I wanna give those to people and they're like gifts. And seeing how they react to it is like, is everything, because maybe I didn't understand what everyone was into you like, in my peers or like saying things and not knowing why, maybe I'm not heard the way I wanna be heard or like, you know, people use words maybe differently than I do. So it's like, oh, drawing was this thing that I, I started to relate to people with. And then that turned into making, animations and games and things like that. And just growing this greater fidelity to like, reach people, but also like show people how I think or what I'm into. And you know, many times throughout childhood, just with a vivid imagination, you kind of look out in the world and you're like, oh, like I see some, I see a T-Rex in the front yard, you know, is just a common one. I love Jurassic Park. So it's like, imagine just dinosaurs running through the yard would just be the coolest, coolest scene ever. And going and then just imagining everyone with their bikes and kids showing up. And like jumping off into the yard to like look at dinosaurs and run with dinosaurs. If there was a version of play that was more like the way that I imagined things like, the shared you know, making things up. A fun thing that we kind of lose along the way for some reason. We turn 10 or 12 and suddenly it's not fun to play make-believe anymore or something. And it would be cool if we just like kept that going. And that made me really curious about augmented reality technology. Now this is back in like 2006, 2007 or something. Cameras actually had some interesting features back then. They had depth sensors, things like that. I became very curious about the technologies that were available. Even just to do this for still photos. Because at the time I was interested in animation and claymation, so I was like, oh, if I could find a way to like put characters into the world, this would be so cool! And I grew a lot of interest there. But the idea of this real time AR thing was like not a thing until iPhones started getting cameras that were pretty good. And I kind of immediately jumped into that in like 2014, 2015 because what was occurring was my parents were like moving outta my childhood at home. And I love that place. I grew up, you know, from the time I was a baby and I was sad that all these memories that we had growing up would just be kind of like lost in space. Like the next people to move in wouldn't know what it was like when we were there. And I saw my parents painting over the height measurements on the molding. I was like, how is this not the most heartbreaking thing? I guess it was. But to me, I was like, we need to preserve this. And so just the idea of like, what if I could take a photo of that and keep it in the same place it was so people could visit the house and know what it was like when we were there. As they explored and then thinking about that for every space. And that was actually like my first AR venture or company back when I was like 19. Dropped outta school, pursued it as a startup. And I learned a ton through that. I was a naive kid now running a business. Didn't know what that entailed truly. But I've learned a lot since. But yeah, I think it really just comes down from like a desire to connect to people in places like the way that I feel or think which is maybe nostalgic or questions of things. You know, why is anything the way that it is? A big role model of mine is Rodney Mullen, who is interestingly in the AR space. Like, how did that happen? But he just has a good quote about like, outsiders finding their way in. And that's what I think of a lot like where I'm seeing the cross section with DreamPark. That makes me so happy, which is like, I'm not gonna be like the center of the party. I'm not the dj. I'm not a performer in that sense. But I do wanna participate. And so like the fact that this tech knowledge and creativity that I've really invested in, which has been kind of like a lonely activity, honestly, something I you know, I do by myself is now like my entry point to like, reaching crowds of people. That is truly like a dream come true. And I would say for like any creators coming up, if you're really into your art and your creativity a big part of it will be figuring out how you can use that to connect to people and reach people, because they're the people who will give you the energy back and like the, you know, resources even that you need to like, keep doing that. And when you find that some kids find it really early, which is amazing, some find it later, but like once you find that thing that like, lets you relate to people and then they relate back, it's kind of the most magical thing in the whole world. So I feel like I'm close to that or, in that right now.

Nathan C: 17:19

I love this idea like the technology is really like the creative medium that gives you the ability to sort of express and share and participate, in a way that makes sense to your vision of the world and like, that balance and that adapting to your strengths, I think is really beautiful. I love any story around technology where the answer is creativity or finding your voice or like, this passion for like sharing all these ideas that you can now manifest into the world. Along this journey, one of the questions that I always like to ask is about when you've had to either, make a decision or, when you've learned something, usually it's from your customers. And how do you respond to either that critique or that opportunity, when you see it? With your partners or, in the work that you've done previously, how do you approach learning moments, whether they're positive or negative?

Aidan Wolf: 18:23

Yeah, absolutely. So this is where I have an amazing co-founder, Kevin. We worked together for a decade and a lot of what brought us together early on especially was this honest feedback and like in helping each other and what we're working on and like brainstorming and thinking through things. And also he helped me get what I was working on in front of people, which was fantastic when I, I would be tweaking on something for months and months, without even showing anyone else'cause it needed to be perfect right before I could show anyone. He would just grab whatever I was working on and start showing people you know, in the coworking space that we were in. And then you actually like see their smiles or their reactions and their laughs and then you're like, why did I wait six months to like, it would be like telling the longest joke of all time. Why would you, why would you wait?

Nathan C: 19:12

You wait till the end of the comedy special to clap!

Aidan Wolf: 19:14

Yes, exactly, exactly! Like hold your laughter until the end, okay? Really that, that opened me up a lot, helped me get my, my stuff out there, working with Kevin. And that's how, honestly, it's continued to this day. Kevin would take the latest version of DreamPark, get it out on the promenade start showing people. So we just constantly collect feedback. We'd watch and see their impressions. People, especially the public, are quite honest. It's kind of cool actually in LA especially, I say is a good ecosystem because everyone has access to great art, great experiences, movies, they kind of understand it. Like people who live there are into it as like a, you know, a culture and a history and everything. So when you show them something, you know, you get, you get good honesty and so we did look at like certain metrics, right? Which would be like, if someone's enjoying this, they would probably wanna play it for a long time. And so, you know, a big balance in the beginning was thinking about like, how much do we actually have to build for this to be enjoyable. And then Brent, our other co-founder, gave us like a good metric, which was, he's like, well, in the arcade business it's about a dollar per minute, or more, for entertainment, premium entertainment. So you need to keep people in for 20 minutes at least. So we can sell a$20 ticket. Ideally 30 minutes. And it was like, oh! That's great. So we have like a timeframe we have to work towards. And then when you're only like two developers working, doing all the art, doing everything, you're like, how are we gonna produce 20 minutes of content that this is like, like especially when we only really had maybe four weeks, five weeks because we're on this like no budget. You know, we had no money, we just had these headsets. The testing and getting out there was so essential to see that even just from a small amount of content, something that we thought was only really 30 seconds or a minute, two minutes at most of play, ended up being like 10 minutes, 15 minutes. We're like, well that's strange. Oh, because it's actually fun to play in this like larger space in this like kind of beautiful location with your friends. You know? There was like all these like conditions that weren't just in there in the editor when we're working on it. When working on something, it's really essential to like, just get it out to people. Read their genuine reactions. Like you kind of have to be there to see their face, you know? And we did get some of that where it's like, this is the headset. It would be like, they put it on and look around. Oh, cool! Thanks! You know, and it was like, it wasn't like a,"This is the most life-changing thing!" You have to kind of measure between like, you know, hey, they're saying it's great and thanks, but they're handing the headset back in 30 seconds. That's probably, you know, probably something missing. So what we worked towards was the person who took the headset, put it on, went"Wow!" And like, didn't listen to us. Like after that. Like they didn't even take it off if we were like, oh, and by the way you have to like, they were like, eh, whatever. And then were already walking like towards something. And that was the moment we saw this like launch off into something. For example, you saw at AWE we don't use straps on our headsets. So that was like a big insight we learned on the ground. We wouldn't have learned that if we weren't play testing. And that opened up so much because now we weren't there strapping'em in. Oh, by the way, when you're a stranger on the street showing someone a headset that's now gonna be like stuck to their face, they, they just go, oh yeah, yeah, no thanks. I don't know who you are, what's in there. This is scary. You hand it to'em and you put it in their hands and they hold it up themselves. You know you got'em. And so we just like broke down the time to entry from like 15 seconds, 20 seconds to a second, and then they were already walking off to the races. And it was all these small innovations that led to seeing that metric that Brent had set for us, which was like, you gotta get people in there for, you know, at least 20 minutes. And then it was like, wow, in our, our five week prototype was getting people in there for 20 minutes. I've never had someone use my AR apps for more than maybe a minute!

Nathan C: 23:18

20 minutes is a long time for me to be in headset. Like, if I'm doing anything other than like meditation or like a game maybe, but like I'm not very tolerant of it, but there's something about that freedom and safety that, just being able to pull it on and off. And I think that the world is anchored around you. You see other people, you see that you're still in the park. That all you know, I think makes it that much more accessible. The metric, right? Like there is no better sell than, having the VC investor's kids, you know, be stuck in the game for an hour. One of the things that I, I've noticed in augmented reality games and in virtual reality spaces is if the user experience is pleasant and delightful enough and has a little bit of intuitive interaction, people will typically try to do everything that's possible. That was my experience when I tried DreamPark at AWE was like, I wanna see all of the different spaces. I'm a little bit like, I'm not as much of a gamer. I'm not in like massive multiplayer game spaces a lot. So the, the idea of like an active game board that's kind of there and people are interacting with it, but like, there's no start line. You know, so many, you know, video games in my era, you know, you start in the same place and it's a very narrative sequence. And what I loved about DreamPark is that the world is there. People are already playing. There's animations and things that are timed. And there's also things that are like, triggered by what I'm doing as a player. And, it made it feel like there wasn't a set script that I had to do, but there was an incredible amount that I could do. And once I like got through, there were a couple different acts. And like, once I got to the part where I had the wand, I wanted to go through the whole thing and try to get to that place faster and more intentionally. So that active space was just, such an eye-opener for me. How did you sort of come to that, design choice or that, content decision?

Aidan Wolf: 25:35

Some of it is necessity. We had to work on something in a short timeframe. But what it really comes down to is inspiration from theme park design. That's why we call it a theme park. If you observe the people element at theme parks, you realize even a group of people are on all these different trajectories. You know, you have like the mom who's there with the kids, and the kids really want to go on all the rides, and the mom doesn't. But she gets some food and is able to watch them and is just enjoying the ambience of the park because it's just a nice place to be. There's characters walking around, there's music, everything. So, taking that inspiration of like, there's something for everyone, whether they're like an active player or just, you know, an observer and are just enjoying looking at the experience. So you'll notice like in the background, there's characters jumping up and down and there's you know, movement and things. It's just like, this whole world that I can kind of like look around and explore. And this has boiled down now into, you know, a hundred different design guidelines that I'm trying to piece together for everyone because yeah, it's, it's like, it's so many small things. And it's just getting better and better. We're learning so much through all these different park designs. But a lot of it just comes down to like, you know, consent in the nicest word of just like, you know, you don't throw stuff at, you know, a player's face when they don't want it to. You know, you don't pop out and scare them when they're in, in an ambient experience enjoying it. There's all those elements and then, like how we play with scale. Because we can do this like massive mixed reality things that are large in the distance actually just look interesting as is. It's kinda like the castle at Disney, right? Like it's not doing anything crazy. You know, outside of getting a reservation to it, you can't even go into it. You just look at it. And that's still a great experience for people. So we were just taking in all those concepts of like, oh yeah, make something that's interesting to look at. And then fun to interact with if you deepen your interest and engagement. And then make it wide open, because at a theme park, you can go to the largest rollercoaster in the park before you go on the kiddy rides and you're allowed to do that, you know, there's no, like, you need to go through rollercoaster 1, 2, 3, and 5 to build up, you know, the choice is yours. And I just remember that going to Six Flags, that was like the inspiration. I was like, sometimes the first thing you do is you just beeline to the boss fight. You go to like Superman, the largest rollercoaster. You get that amazing high and then everything else is just fun after that.'Cause you're scared too. You're kind of like, Ooh, I, you know, I don't know if I have a big rollercoaster in me and you go do it. And then with video games, the video game element, I'll just say is first-person narrative games. Half-Life was a huge part of my childhood. As violent as it was, but when you look into the design of that game it's so well thought through and designed. The people behind it were just, you know, incredible thinkers, designers, developers, because everything was built to respond to the player and the things that you think are just happening around you. Even just the sound effects and like the drop of water that you hear in the corner was thought through by someone who was like, I am going to keep them interested and build a world around them. And that is a huge inspiration for how we like design the actual game elements is, hey how do you make a world that feels like it exists, whether I'm here or not. That it's something that I've walked into that, I just happened to be catching the most incredible magic moments, but actually it was designed that you, you know, you would see it intentionally. So, that's a huge inspiration point as well.

Nathan C: 29:08

How you balance the storytelling and the vision of the, the immersive experience and this sort of innate, directorial role that the player has in a space like that. In many experiences, you're kind of in the single track thing where you have to do the one thing to unlock the next. And, the player focused reactive space, is just a design choice that I, I so appreciate. The name of the show is called The Tech Glow Up, you know it's a notable transformation or rebirth. We use it to talk about goals in the short to midterm. So I'm curious in the next three to six months you alluded to some things you're building. Some content, some platform things. What's the big glow up that you're focused on at DreamPark, in the next bit here?

Aidan Wolf: 29:57

Yeah. Wow! It's three wild horses that we need to rein in and, and get into the same place. I would say it's, you know, the location acquisition, the square footage quest. How can we get to every mall, every park? We wanna work with the malls and parks. We wanna make this like a great collaboration. Those conversations are going well. It's really cool to be like, hey parks actually need help these days. We didn't realize that because people are going to them less, when there's less people in them, they actually are less safe. So families stop coming and then it's like, well, what if there's a DreamPark there that gets all these families out? There's a big thing of like figuring out what the real world needs and how we potentially are helping in ways that we didn't think were possible. Like it's not just like a, oh yeah we'll set up a DreamPark and it's a business and a fun thing. It's like, oh yeah, like malls are dying. We can help malls. Like parks are empty. We can fill them up with people. What is our towns and strip malls and main streets for anymore? Maybe we can help with those. We wanna help like glow up Main Street. How do we bring, you know, mainstream America back to life with a DreamPark? With just exciting games, museums, education, everything that like, you'd have to drive into the city to do. You can just get 10 minutes from your home. And then the other thing is we have all this great content on the way. You saw the preview potentially of it at DreamPark in AWE. That's our, you know, sci-fi, spaceport park. Just awesome robots, spaceships. It's so cool! And then Wand Dual Wizards Way, which is, you know, just a full on, you know, magical wands, wizards collecting magical ingredients, everything like that. So much fun! We have Crash Course with the obstacle course, Fall Guys-style gameplay. And a couple other things that we'll announce. Obviously we're looking at holiday content, things like that. Excited about that. It's getting all that great content ready and then on our platform so that when we go to all these locations, it's available to play and set up. And then that third aspect is like the platform underneath the content powering the locations. Like what's that service that people are implementing, what does it look like? And that is just gonna look like get DreamPark on your own headset or, get headsets from us. If you're more like a business use case and wanna do that. And then just really just being able to look at a space, you know, whether it's a park or your own retail space or a mall. You can use DreamPark and our app to set that up. In less than an hour, you could just have like a whole theme park to yourself. That you can do anything you want with. If you're a taco stand with a parking lot, you could build a DreamPark around it and just get people, you know coming to play and enjoy what you're serving. So it's like, give everyone just an ability to kind of set up their own DreamPark wherever they are, is really the goal. And then how we manage that after, because ideally we have so many people who wanna set these up that it's gonna be quite interesting to see what they do with it, where they set it up, everything like that. So yeah.

Nathan C: 32:58

You hinted, potentially at also creating tools for other people to develop in DreamPark?

Aidan Wolf: 33:04

Little, little bit later. I take like a Nintendo approach, so it's like you kind of have to use your first-party content to define what the hardware is and the software is. And then you can extend that to third-parties. And so I think we're really in that delicate phase. We are learning so much on the design and people side of things, that is so valuable that once we figure out how to translate that into maybe features or like dev tools, it's gonna help everyone just do this mixed reality in the real world stuff better. Like we talk about, you have no control over the real world in many regards. And you have to be able to adjust for that. And that's what I think we're doing a really good job doing. And we're gonna be able to like, translate that to other developers.

Nathan C: 33:47

That's amazing! I have this vision of like a Chromebook cart full of Quest 3 headsets, and a locker of tricycles. And it's just a kit that you could ship off on practically a pallet. I love it! What an amazing time to be building and sharing this spatial understanding of the world and this, this very playful, collaborative approach. Real quickly, so The Tech Glow Up always likes to make time to give a shout out to a community group or somebody you think is doing great work that could use a little spotlight. Is there, anybody that you'd like to share a spotlight with today?

Aidan Wolf: 34:30

First that comes to mind is look'em up, Trev 3D on Instagram, Twitter. Just kind of creating the most mind blowing, technologically rich laser tag experience for mixed reality. Just sets up laser tag wherever you are, you could play and blast with the each other and, and just all the details are so nice and it's so fun! And still like a grad student, you know, that I think deserves a spotlight and industry attention. So you know, look out for them! And then I think any of the other ones would be too biased or selfish here because it would be like, you know, check out Alan working on Wand Dual. Of course Wand Dual is part of DreamPark and he goes by Zu Lipa on Twitter. And my awesome co-founders, Brent Bushnell and Kevin Habich. Kevin goes by Kevando on his social media. Check him out! Brent goes by his name.

Nathan C: 35:19

Support 3D creators and people building mind blowing experiences in mixed reality! And making it accessible!

Aidan Wolf: 35:27

And anyone doing it now, where the industry is at such a low point, you're incredible because that just shows your heart is in it. Your creativity, you care! Because, you know, people are struggling out there, but some of you're just still putting in the work. I love to see it!

Nathan C: 35:41

I love this! How about you and the DreamPark team? Is there anything that you're looking for these days and how can people, uh, follow up and learn more?

Aidan Wolf: 35:50

Yeah! We do want to work with great content creators. People who have ideas they might see translate into DreamPark. So if you're imagining like 50,000, a hundred thousand square foot, you know, mixed reality experiences hit us up if you have cool things! If you have locations that are underserved, or you could imagine this being part of your like, existing events, conferences, things like that, that's something we wanna get more into. It's just like, you know, more partners that we can expand with. You can also book a ticket to a DreamPark today. So if you go to visit dreampark.com, you happen to be in the Seattle area, or Santa Monica, LA area you can go and then soon enough Long Island will be opening in the next two weeks or so. And that will also be through our website. So you can go and go check it out! It's like a ticketed thing. There'll be people there, they have headsets, they'll get you in. You can have fun.

Nathan C: 36:40

Oh, goodness! So amazing! Aidan Wolf, it has been such a lovely conversation to learn about how this desire to express yourself, to connect with people and to sort of express this creative world building vision that you've always had has led you to such a magical spark of a mixed reality concept that's allowing you to connect with users to help cities and real estate developers and theme parks understand how they can build community and use their space. I love that play and connection and testing is part of not only how you've had so much success this year, but also how your co-founders, sort of challenge and encourage each other. This has been, such an inspiring conversation. Really one of the top XR experiences I've seen all year. Such a delight. Thank you for joining me on The Tech Glow Up today!

Aidan Wolf: 37:43

Thank you for having me, Nathan. This is awesome! It's only gonna get better, from what you saw at AWE, the experience is just on its way. So yeah. Thanks for having me. Love to talk about DreamPark anytime and get the latest from you!

Nathan C: 37:55

Visit dreampark.com. Awesome!