 We have a new speaker here. It's Ty Sposher, I guess quite a few you know him Seems to me like a lot of you are here for him, especially So he's a very experienced forensic analyst and also penetration testers So you would think you know on a hacker conference. He would be talking about that But no, he will talk about something else entirely He will talk about the art of creating an escape room So maybe there's some similarity to you know packing and stuff. Maybe not. We'll see I'm excited to hear what he has to say. So please give a warm welcoming applause to him now. Thank you Thank you. I must say I'm quite overwhelmed with the amount of people in the room I've been walking past quite some talks and I was really afraid it would be quite empty here So thank you for coming and I hope I can entertain you a bit for the next hour I can talk about escape rooms for hours on end. So I'll try to squeeze it in an hour And I'll just kick me off the stage and my presenter. Just stop working. It's technology. I can only go backwards It's gonna be a very short presentation. No, so I'll quickly introduce myself for the people who don't know me I'm Thijs Bossert. I'm a security professional. I freelance at the moment I've been active in the security industry for around 15 years and be hobbying for around 20 years I've done a lot of different security things, but I'm not here for the security part I'm more for one of my hobbies which turned into a profession as well, and that's the escape room design Besides that, I'm also a CTF player, which I do together with a couple of teams One of them being the Eindbaser, which Gladim and half are sitting here. Thank you guys So with the Eindbaser team, we are actually next door on this field in this CTF tent and We organized the CTF during SHA 2017 So people have been battling and taking each other to solve all kind of challenges trying to get the first spot and We have a lounge where they can play in. We have some tables they can play on and I actually I submitted a proposal for a talk about CTFs but that got rejected So sadly enough I had to Skip that so I cannot talk about the CTF and the statistics that we had more than thousand teams Joining us that we had 462 teams were actually were involved with 114 teams playing from onsite on SHA And the team that won was each sleep on repeat Which were onsite and they have been number one from the start. They did a pretty great job We did a junior CTF as well, which had a lot of low-level challenges So people could get introduced with CTFing and enjoy it while not be While not be scared about the way too hard challenges in a normal CTF a lot of people play that as well And we really enjoyed hosting it. It's still open till the end of SHA. So if you're interested, we're next door But I had another talk While talking about SHA online one of the Eindbaser team members asked me Why don't you give a talk about escape rooms? Because he thought it would be awesome and I thought about it. It was like why not? So I submitted it and that talk got accepted So the first question is what is an escape room? Well, you can read it yourself and Thank you Google So an escape room is a room where you go in and solve puzzles and escape room is not a panic room Quite often when I'm talking about escape rooms people have an idea. I built panic rooms So if you order an escape room for me and you accept a panic room You might be in for a treat when you run inside your panic room You first have to solve puzzles for one hour before you can get out So what will I be talking about? So I built a couple of escape rooms I built a created two which are currently being deployed But I designed and partly created four and I will be talking about the designing the building some technology behind it the designing of the puzzles the puzzle flows and a lot of things that went wrong Why did I want to build an escape room? It all started somewhere around 2014 together with the Eindbaser part of the Eindbaser team we decided to play an escape room and Basically after playing the first escape room it got me hooked It for me. It was some kind of real life hacking and I really like to solve puzzles we managed to actually escape from the room so it gave me a nice feeling about escape rooms and Some statistics at that time in the Netherlands there were around 48 rooms in 28 locations so it was already growing in the Netherlands and Where are the rooms in the Netherlands? everywhere Giving a big forward to March 2015. I took a sabbatical. I was still working in security as I am now But I took a sabbatical for six months and four months in I decided to quit my job Take the two months notice went on a trip to Australia went to on to New Zealand and I had a lot of walks and I said on a lot of mountains I was carrying a small notebook and during the all the walking I did and the sitting on top of mountains I thought about my future. I thought about my career. I thought about what do I want to do in my life? So I came back and I still didn't know what I wanted to do in my life But in that small booklet I scribbled a lot of different things and one of those things were all kind of puzzles I came up with and I made some flows of puzzles I find some teams I wrote some scenarios and I was like, yeah, I still think escape rooms are awesome And I want to build one Then I came back I started as a freelancer doing security stuff and that ID was still there But I didn't do anything with it at that time There were one of the safety rooms in the Netherlands on 73 locations So they were on the rise Then a month later I saw a local newspaper which had an item about one of the local companies claiming they would open a escape room in a couple of months And then I thought, shit, I wanted to do that So I thought about it and I decided why not contact them So I contacted them, asked about them, asked them about the escape rooms And they told me we basically said that so nobody else would build one Boy, we have no idea how to build it, we have no one to do it So that worked out pretty well I showed up with a lot of notes, a lot of designs I made in the meantime And they initially thought I was a professional escape room builder So they hired me and I created my first escape room We joined in a partnership so I would partly be owner of the whole system And they would take a license Now I actually had to create an escape room And it actually had to be built instead of scribbling something on paper And I found out building an escape room is hard There's an insane amount of things you need to take into account Or you just can't disregard all that Throw 500 euros at it, buy a couple of locks, make a shitty experience Nobody is going to play again And that's what a lot of companies do So how did I go on about to build an escape room? First part was to choose a team And that's quite hard because we already saw there were quite some rooms in the Netherlands back then And of course every room has a team And you have to find a team that inspires you But it doesn't already have 20 rooms in the Netherlands with the same team Because then people simply won't play your room, even if it's awesome In case I think of something unique Well, with the amount of rooms in the Netherlands in the end, no But you might give it a twist The next part with coming up with a team is building mood boards So just Google a lot And you just throw a lot of stuff on a page Small parts, large parts Getting an idea about colors, about items, about what you might want to put in a room Some things that might be way too far fetched but look really cool And with creating a couple of mood boards you get a better idea about a team And after you find your team, you choose a team And then the next part comes, write a scenario You don't have to do this, but it helps a lot So after you find your team, you write some kind of scenario How you think the room should be built How the puzzle should be influenced How the whole story unfolds during that hour you're in that room You want to entertain the people for an hour long I wrote a lot of different things And then changed it and changed it and changed it And during the rest of the building of the room I completely changed it again But it gives you an idea where you want to go After that I started with some physical location concepts To have an idea how big a room needs to be How you will connect everything What kind of size you need Another thing is location For me it's already fixed because I partnered up with a different company But I saw escape rooms are basically in three different kind of locations In the middle of nowhere In a city or part of something bigger And part of something bigger I mean a location where you can play laser tag Or where you can play, or where you can go karting Or that kind of things Might have a bar So there's quite a bit of difference between these three locations Because if you're playing an escape room It's the same when you play an escape room If you choose a location to play one You probably do not want to choose the one in the middle of nowhere Because you finish your escape room, you had an awesome time And then you get kicked out because the next team comes along And you're standing in a parking lot And I had that a couple of times and it's quite an anticlimax of your experience So in a city you can just walk next door to the next pub Enjoy a couple of beers and talk about your experience Or being part of a bigger complex if you have a bar inside You go there, you talk with your friends and you still have a great time I will come back to why I explained this part And I'm now going back to my physical location I started making some building plans So I knew what kind of size I had to work with So I decided how many rooms I would use And the whole layout At that time I joined up with a partner Which joined me in building escape rooms And he took over part of the job so we built it together Then we changed it all around Till we got some nice floor plans of what we wanted to build Because we only played a couple of rooms And we never played a room together We decided to play a room together somewhere else To see what our thinking process would be So I was there together with a partner who joined me And we decided to play a couple of rooms During that we actually found out We thought completely different about escape rooms And what we had to do about it So it's really useful This was August 2015 Around that time there were 192 rooms in the Netherlands In 113 locations They got more and more popular So I already was wondering Does it actually make sense to keep building these rooms? But we kept going because we wanted to build those rooms We went on and we made some digital designs Of the rooms we wanted to build We placed some objects in there Played around with the space What would fit How do we want to build it And we decided on the two teams And what we wanted to do with it And the scenarios we wanted to do We started designing the control room Because an escape room is basically where you are playing And the guys who are watching you need to be somewhere as well Which I will touch on a bit later as well The next part is Now we have a digital idea of what we want Now we have to find the items And we have to put a lot of stuff in that room And we want to make it all look natural That means I've been visiting thrift shops for years And a couple of times a week So they basically know me when I walk inside And you just look around And every now and then it's like Yes, this is my item You take it with you, you store it somewhere And the next day you basically do the same And you really want to have stuff that fits together Because you want to have a nice immersion For the people playing the room The immersion is part of the real experience And one of the things I really don't like If I'm in an escape room And it has all kinds of IKEA furniture And claims to be from the 80s That way you're not really in the story Sometimes you have some big stuff in the room Or maybe the location you use has something like this So how do you hide that? You might build something around it One of the things we had to do is Finding a way to hide the subwoofers in the room Which I will show in one of the other pictures later on What we did with that Also the natural part If you have a cupboard And if you want to lock that You probably want to use the real lock inside of it Around 50% of the escape rooms just put a padlock on that And it feels really artificial It works, but it's simply not the natural look you want Sorry There we go Once again we decided to play in an escape room While designing everything, while building everything And we still finished the room And this was in December 2015 At that time there were 260 rooms in the Netherlands On 151 locations And every time I looked at the stats I was like, yeah, I'm not sure this is actually a great idea To keep doing this But we were already quite far away So far along the way, so we just continued And in the meantime we were designing the puzzles There are a lot of different kind of puzzles You can use in the escape room The whole idea is 60 minutes Of solving different puzzles that you get out of the room So you do not want to have 60 minutes of finding a key Using it in a lock, finding a new key Using it in a lock, finding a new key Using it in a lock And then probably find a new key and use it in a lock There are rooms out there who exactly do that And they are completely linear And afterwards you probably have an idea I had no idea what we have done But I tried keys on all kind of locks And in the end we solved it So you want to have different kind of puzzles It does not matter if you every now and then find a key And try it in a lock You have some combination locks It does not mean that if you throw 20 combination locks After each other that you have a better room You also want to have some other kind of puzzles You want to have people think about puzzles You might want to have them something to do They might have to join forces together to be able to solve something From my experience I can tell you You do not want to use too much technology It is really awesome to throw a lot of technology in your puzzles Technology breaks And it is pretty hard when the technology breaks Which we will see some examples later on To cover for that You cannot say to the next group Yes sorry the whole room is gone because one of the puzzles broke And the last part is logic I have played quite a bit of rooms And afterwards I was like I had no idea why I had to replace this here And then that door opened There is nothing explaining that But I had to do it, it worked But please make sure there is some logic in there And then going on, building the puzzles You create a concept, you create a prototype You test your prototype, you go back You adjust and then you discard I created quite some puzzles And in the end I was like yeah this is not going to work Some puzzles are not feasible And some puzzles might make sense in your own head And not in one's else And it is hard to do to discard stuff Especially if you use a lot of time to create it After that you create a first version You have a test run So you throw the puzzle at someone else And try it If they like it You might say okay we are going to use this one Then you have to create a version Which actually works in real time And stays working more than two times I spent a lot of time at home Placing stuff on sensors So for hours and hours Just making sure that it works And if it doesn't work you have to adjust the sensors Buy new sensors I made some puzzles with magnets And I found out it is really hard to get A strong reading with a magnet Make sure every time the sensor gets triggered If I put this here it needs to be triggered If I put it here it doesn't need to be triggered It should not trigger But if I use it here slightly to the left And it doesn't work anymore It makes it really hard to get a stable room So if people are playing in a room And they have to put this thing here And it needs to trigger something It's really bad if you have to tell them after the moment Please move it a little bit to the left Then it might trigger the sensor A little bit more to the right Yeah that should do it That took me a lot of time building that kind of stuff And that brings me back to the thing I said before Don't use too much technology Making it robust is quite hard Which we will see some examples of You'll have a lot of wear and tear And you have to replace your stuff Once you build the escape room You'll have to build basically the whole room again after a year If you want to work with locks There are quite a bit of different kind of locks The normal one, the pin tumblers, the wafers, padlocks That kind of things Combination locks, electronic locks with Bluetooth, RFID Magnetic stuff You can use a lot of microcontrolls Artinos, raspberry pies You might use some Bluetooth stuff It doesn't really matter what you have It's a nice combination of these kind of things With the microcontrollers One of the things we had a lot of different issues with If you buy cheap knock-off Artinos They might want to reset them every hour Because they get pretty unstable Some of the concepts we used We would design stuff digitally first And then you can do whatever you want And have the wildest IDs And then you have to build it And you have to make sure that it actually can be built In your budget So this one actually turned out to be that one And it's before it's painted And during the building of this I figured something out My partner and I did not agree On the way you should create a network cable And we were using power over Ethernet So basically he was using the A version I was using the B version And we threw power over Ethernet on it And while measuring some of the cables I blew a couple of cable testers We actually there's still In one of the rooms I've built There's still some cabling inside of that Which you first have to look at the cable Before you do anything with it Because it was really hard to fix that all After building it So make sure you communicate And make standards together If you're working together Some other examples of puzzle designs This is a chess piece, a chess board Which would have some kind of electronics behind it And this is one of the things Where the sensors really come into account Because it only needs to work When this chess piece is on this spot And you want to make sure that if it's 2mm to the right It's still okay But if it's halfway one of the others You shouldn't And it took way more time than it should And I built it in some old chess board So it looked natural Which made it way harder to build I was pretty happy with it in the end And then it broke And that brings me to the puzzle failures Sometimes you need to accept defeat Not everything works Some puzzles are not feasible I had some wild ideas Building an Omicron controller in an old Nokia phone And make it look like a normal phone Where you could check a text message And I built it all And then I dropped it and it was completely gone And you will know anyone in your room Will drop that within a week So I could not get it stable enough And I had to drop the whole idea Like I said, sometimes it just breaks during the creation So you have a lot of puzzles Then it brings me to the next part, the puzzle flow Like I said, some of the rooms are finding a key Using a lock, finding a key, using a lock And that's a linear approach And even if it's not a key A key can be a word Can be placed on this location Anything like that But still you don't want to have a room It is puzzle, key, puzzle, key Because that means only one person is actually playing in the room And if you are going into the room with eight people That means eight people are walking around each other Through the room And then you have seven people who are bored And one person who has a great time So you want to have something partly linear Partly parallel You cannot have it completely parallel I played one room which was like eight parallel puzzles Which would all give one number And that was the end Which didn't make sense at all So this is what we kept in mind while building this And this is one of the flows of one of the rooms And even building this for myself to quite well And then you are adjusting it But you make sure multiple people are in the room Enjoying themselves Solving some of the puzzles It comes back together Goes on to the next part of the room And this is one hour of entertainment And if you are really good you might be able to solve it in 45 minutes This is one of the flows of one of the other rooms Which is quite a bit different But there is a lot of parallel work A lot of parallel things to make sure everybody enjoys their time Having the puzzles, having the puzzle flows Brings me partly to the rest of the room You need some furniture in there And then it's going back to the thrift shop Looking around And sometimes you find something in the thrift shop Which haunts you So I walked past this display through the thrift shop And it was in my mind And I kept walking and I was like Those are disturbing There was a couple of paintings Why would anybody make that So I bought them and I put them in the room So everybody, I actually bought two more in the end So from all sides in one of the rooms These children are looking at you That gives you a great funny feeling while you are playing the room Sometimes you really think you will find the right item And then you will find an even better one the next week I wanted to have an old phone And I really loved it when I finally found it And then I found a red one And this was for a bunker team An old military bunker And I really like to have the red phone And we already built the one on the left So we had to discard that and use the red one Besides all the puzzles, there are a lot of other technology in the room Part of it being the light With the light you can really control the immersion of the players You can make it dark, of course You can influence the moods we used In the end we used a lot of LED lighting So LED spots, LED strips or LED panels Which we wanted to make sure to be able to trigger them So we wanted to control the light anytime we wanted In any color we wanted And we wanted to do it manually as well as automatically So I bought a lot of light panels And a lot of hardware from China And I spent quite some days trying to get everything working This is all controlled over DMX And people who have worked with DMX before Actually we had some people in the room next to this tent Who wasted a day on trying to get DMX working It's quite a pain In the end we could control every panel in any color we want And then these panels we used in the ceiling And we built some frames around it And they look like ceiling windows They were pretty good, I was really happy with that And it actually fooled me I installed them myself And while I was building the rest of the room We had them on a kind of light It really felt like it was light outside And then at 12 at night I walked outside It was completely pitch dark And it completely screwed up my beer rhythm And that way, by working it into the room This way you can really control the immersion of the players Some other technology we used, the cameras You want to make sure you can see every spot in the room And you want to do that in an affordable way Cameras can be really expensive And we decided to go with Foscom cameras And some other software And also this was quite a lot of work to set up In the end, with the lighting, with all the puzzles With the networking, with the cameras We ended up with a lot of cables coming into one location Which we did not label at that moment That was one of the things we found out Was not a very good idea And these are actually cables from two different rooms And they're not even sorted per room So we definitely could improve here In this picture we started with labeling all the different wires So these are lighting This is part of all the puzzles being connected over power Over ethernet These are sound Because we had sound on every part in the room The paintings I just showed you We put those in front of the audio outputs So you couldn't see them and they would not block the sound So you had no idea where the sound would come from And we could actually let the paintings talk to you Which make them even more haunting So all the cables should throw them all together And connect them to all the stuff we had We made some custom power over ethernet injectors Which we could remotely switch with a USB relay System And also with that one we ran a lot of problems If you buy a cheap USB relay from China Then you're completely on your own Of how to actually switch something with that And we found out if you reboot the machine And the USB is connected to that Then it basically during bootings tries to Reset all the relays 20 times And that's great for your Ardino's to do that One of the other things we built in Which if you want to have a nice experience You actually want to have some kind of hint system And we wanted to have a hint system Which really fitted the room So we built a mirror If you look at the mirror you see yourself But if we actually send something to it You get text in the mirror There's some technology behind it So basically it's an old monitor There's a Raspberry Pi in there And we're working together in one frame And in the end it looked pretty natural How we built it The frame is from some old painting I bought at a thrift store Throw away the painting, use the frame And this way we can communicate With the players in the room In one of the other rooms we used A small printer Which you normally get a receipt from And we built that in an old device And this is now a TELIX machine Which sends you TELIX messages as a hint system And that way you're still immersed In the whole room What I don't like, what quite a lot of rooms do As soon as you get a hint Somebody is using some kind of way To talk of the audio system And completely gets you out of the game Or somebody walks inside of the room To tell you But that's why we really wanted To have some kind of hint system Back to that digital design This was the digital design we came up with And this is the actual room And when I first walked inside my own room Which I designed I really felt like I'm not in that complex anymore I'm actually standing inside a wood cabin And it really felt natural So I was really happy how it worked out And at that time it became time to Have people test the room Because I built something together with the partner And it made sense to us So how much sense would it make to others And I was really happy the first players ever in my room Were my brother and my parents And they sadly did not make the room They did not manage to escape Partly because there was some stuff Where it simply didn't work But they still enjoyed doing this And after that I started making adjustments to make sure That it would be ready for the next test persons And of course I enjoyed a beer While watching them playing the room At that time There were 200 There were 274 rooms in the Netherlands On 156 locations And once again I was like I'm not sure this will keep up this way After I designed the room And built it and in the beginning I would be the game master of the games It was time to hand it over To the employees of the complex I could build it together with And those game masters They can make or break your experience And they will be in a control room Sometimes the control room is One screen in a hallway But if they have a decent control room They'll be sitting there for a lot of monitors Watching you play the game They can make and break your experience Which brings me to a story Of those guys and me Playing one of the escape rooms in Atlanta So we're playing that room It goes pretty well And after a while we get stuck There's something inside a cupboard And we cannot get it out And we tried to find anything In the room to do that There was a small hole in the top In the end we almost tried to push Everything we could find through the hole In the room And still no way to solve that So then the time ran out The game master comes in And we were like, yeah How does this puzzle work? And she's like, yeah, you had to use Those two hooks you had And we were like, which hooks? Yeah, you probably lost them No, pretty sure we never found those hooks And it should have been in this belt They were not in this belt And we were like We're pretty sure it was never here So we couldn't have solved the room So she goes back She returns and she tells us I give you the benefit of the doubt Which did not really work well with us And she brought the hooks Yeah, these are the kind of hooks And we were like, well, just reset the clock 15 minutes, give us the hooks And we'll continue playing And that was actually an option So we finished the game in the next 15 minutes And we played the room But that whole experience shows Game masters make or break your experience They have to reset the room They have to make sure everything is in the room Everything needs to be replaced And this was a really bad experience Yeah Yeah So I wanted to make sure That my employees would know How an escape room works So I played an escape room together with my employees This was around April 2016 At that time 326 rooms in the Netherlands On 181 locations And that line just keeps going up I actually played another room with them In August, just to make sure They know how to Actually have the best game experience For the players And in August 2016 386 rooms, more than 200 locations And that line just goes on My employees actually Came up with a fun game To make sure they would pay attention To everything that happens in the room They made escape room bingo Every time somebody would do something stupid In the room, they would cross something off Every time someone would Mispronounce something in the room One of the challenges was Some kind of riddle Which said something about I have to translate it in my head It doesn't really make sense in English I'm sorry, it doesn't work that way But every time somebody would And sometimes people read a sign And they just read it wrong And then the whole group is trying to find The wrong solution And that was one of those as well If somebody would find something in the room You don't need for anything But they kept walking with it for 15 minutes Because they were pretty sure It had something to do with the game All those kind of things I was pretty happy with them doing this Because it would make sure they would pay attention I had some of the employees who were playing With their phone all the time And then something happened One of the players in the room He pulled something open Which was locked with a magnet With an electronic magnet And you needed quite some power to do that And the guy told me He didn't need to fix that Because they just touched it lightly And it jumped open So I watched the cameras back And I actually see someone in the room Walking to that feeling There might be something here Then she walks over to someone else And tells the guy Yeah, I think that can be opened But we're not allowed to use any force Because the employee told us We don't need any force And the guy said We did the judge of that And he just walked over there And he was like But in the mind of the employee It was because it was not built well enough Because he probably was on his phone So came masters Make a breaker experience And that's one of the weak things in escape rooms Even the room Can be really awesome But if they don't Control the game Then it can be a shitty experience About shitty experiences Things break This is a panel We built in Which was 3D printed And it broke In the middle of a game And all those letters fell out And this was the solution By one of the employees Which made it look even shittier And we built a new system A room will have a lot of wear and tear If you put any book in there It's It's pretty badly to see But here you can see text Here it's completely gone By people just touching it Any kind of cable Will break because people will try to Twist and turn anything they come along Sometimes I have no idea Why people would get something From the room and they think I probably have to bend this metal To put the puzzle So there's an old Radio in the room I probably have to To find something in there I thought when I was 3D printed a inside Of one of those lock boxes To make sure they cannot twist it They managed to get something under it And try to use one of the other keys To open it This broke the key and the lock If you use combination locks People twisted around, put it in And set a new combination Come up with something which are 3D printed To make sure they cannot do that anymore It's pretty hard to reset the room When you don't know the combination So for that I actually Learned all my employees how to pick One of those number locks So they could quickly find a new combination Reset it and reset the room I'll skip over that We had some emergency buttons And one of the players Thought well we probably have to Rip that out of the wall Then we put in some Emergency breaking glass And we had some people playing the room Who thought they need to break the glass And then the game ended Because we had a whole system Which failsafe would be If somebody does that or powerful Everything, the game stops And they were really upset about Not being able to finish the game It's pretty clear it's an emergency door release We even explained that in the beginning People also write On stuff I've saw This actually luckily enough Was a raceable marker Never put a normal marker in your room Because people write on the floors You're resetting a room like Okay there's a solution on this floor And how do I get this off And this is what makes it really hard To keep enjoying building a escape room I'm going to show some more numbers While I submitted this talk I actually said at this moment There were 500 escape rooms And I loosely estimated Well, there might be over 600 At this moment Most of the statistics come from One escape room collection sites Which actually shows everyday How many escape rooms there are This was This is now, it didn't reach the 600 But the line is still going on At this moment There are 536 rooms in the Netherlands On 274 locations I like to play in escape room But I only play it every now and then Why? Because it's really expensive And even though I enjoy it It's not something you do every week So there's no way this marker Can keep up New rooms pop up every now Every couple of weeks And I don't think there will be Players enough Especially if I look at the reservations Of other escape rooms They basically are only blocked on Saturday And Friday evening The rest of the week completely empty Which brings me to My idea of the future I think In the next year we'll probably see this There's no way to keep up With the amount of escape rooms in the Netherlands That marker needs to collapse Then again, this is what I already Expected around here But for now It still keeps going on What I do see in the future Is Virtual escape rooms So instead of having a physical escape room You're just going to do some VR stuff You have an empty room With some small stuff in there And what you can do with a virtual room This room is 4x4 5x5 And there's some technology I'm currently working on And the technology Enables us To turn a room 4x4 In an area like this So this is the room you're playing with You're physically stuck in that room But with the VR classes You can see miles and miles Around you And all of a sudden you're in a huge area You just have to find a way The people stay in that room And that's why We have these walls in here So they can walk up there Instead of directly into the wall And this way they can interact With everything around that These are some more shots This is a demo we use We are currently building to show The possibilities of virtual reality In gaming Especially multiplayer gaming Walking around in the same room Untethered With a backpack or wireless HDMI We're working on different things And at that moment enjoying a game together Another place There's a short video about this Which I will try to start This is just a shooter we created But you can see You can see miles in front of you But actually if somebody looks at you In the room It just sees you looking at the wall And you interact with stuff far away This Shooter of course is not an escape room But we create a platform where you can use that And we're going to do this prototyping To get what we're going to do with it It's just some next level thing We think it's going to be the future for gaming Don't you? I actually have some stuff with me Which I might set up tonight Next to the CTF tent To show this demo For people to have never experienced virtual reality To quickly look through it And see what the possibilities are And it actually brings me To the end of my talk Because I rushed over some stuff And that brings me to the questions So yeah, that was a great talk Thank you You could hear everybody enjoyed it So, do we have questions? Please line up at the microphone And I think there will be lots of questions So keep it short, only one person Okay, so what's the business case? Let's say what's the price of a session In the escape room You need to pay for the game masters Then you have the rent of your room And stuff like that Make a break zero That's actually one of the biggest issues With escape rooms And I see a lot of escape rooms Don't have any business plan at all So that's why I see the market collapse as well But basically people pay 25 euros To play the escape room And you make sure you don't pay The game masters anything at all Just some cheap labor And that way people actually manage to make money So this part of the business case That's why I partnered up with someone Who pays the employees and who pays for the building Okay What about rotten places that are cheaper than city places? Three again Rotten places that say Abundant buildings somewhere and nowhere So that's why some of the escape rooms Are in the middle of nowhere Because it's cheap to be there And they probably run it themselves But in the end If we have like 300 escape rooms In the Netherlands People won't go to those locations anymore So it's cheaper to run But you probably don't get enough People playing it to make it worthwhile So 25 euros per person Okay Well actually my room is around 20 So After looking at your talk I realized that I've been to a lot of shitty Escape rooms Thank you It also seems to me that Shitty escape rooms are just Cheaper to build and cheaper to maintain So when the market collapses How do you see that going? Will it be the quality escape rooms that survive Or will it be the shitty ones? I'm quite happy you brought it up Because that's some of the things I wanted to explain With this slide There are still rooms left in my estimation And those will probably Be the better rooms Because there are so many people who want to play In an escape room and they have to choose which room to play And they will in the end go for the best rooms Before I now play an escape room I go online and read the reviews I never read the reviews of the people who played In one escape room Always read the reviews of people who played At least five escape rooms And then sorted with the best reviews first Because then you know Because they had a bad experience Was that because something went wrong That has nothing to do with the room Or is the room just shitty And that's why you find the best rooms And they will keep running We have scheduled an escape room With the family Where can I find yours? So the mines are In North Holland Quite high up In the middle of nowhere But they're part of a bigger complex I will tell you afterwards Thank you One more question So I was wondering with the sensors Have you experimented with a failsafe So that the Game Master could trigger The key lock You really have to build it in Even if something goes wrong in the room The Game Master should always be able to flip a switch So the game goes on And the people playing the room have no idea What went wrong Good point Have you played any other VR Escape rooms yourself? Actually I have played some VR gaming There's a VR Gaming in the Netherlands Called VR Arcade And that's probably what you wanted to hear Yes Are you from VR Arcade? No I have to be careful now I wanted to go there Do that It's a nice experience But you can see the technology is new So there are quite some things that really can be better But it's really cool to have a first Virtual reality gaming experience Walking around freely And seeing each other in the first world I can recommend that We do have time for more If there are any more questions Yes Not really a real question But we just built an escape room Four hours ago in the prison bus Would you like to have a look? For sure And if anybody wants to play Possibly we can take two or three players At 10pm today After the next talk which I want to see How many people can I bring? It's currently for one or two persons Because it's in the prison bus there's not much space Okay But it's only like a 10 to 15 minute thing Just for fun Thanks So I had one question I noticed you didn't mention anything About zoning in the Netherlands About zoning The locations where they are Yeah and permissions and stuff like that Did you leave that out on purpose Because it's hell or? What do you mean permissions? Of gunning There's basically nothing That stops you to build an escape room somewhere And even with safety You would expect safety rules There's not a lot of Controlling that So even there are a lot of rooms Which actually lock you up Physically While the employee is sitting somewhere else In the building The kind of stuff you don't want Those rooms you don't want to play You want to make sure that if something happens You can actually get outside But there is not a lot of control Of where people are building an escape room They pop up everywhere Probably a couple of them will have to close Because of that I built some rooms in Munich And I just can Say Make things unbreakable That's the basic rule And hide it well And that's The biggest issue with escape rooms People will break everything I actually had people Break a metal bar this big I have no idea how By the men is it Do you see a lot of Collaboration going on Between escape rooms? No, not at all Especially in the Netherlands No escape rooms want to work together Because they all want to have the Share of the market Like we can see there's a lot of them And all of them Are really scared about competition And there's a lot of competition So no Every now and then I visit an escape room And the guys are really nice And then I tell them I built escape rooms Usually I don't even bother Except for your own escape rooms What do you think are the best escape rooms In the Netherlands? I would say Decide for yourself And read the reviews I've played quite a bit of them But I haven't played all of them So I cannot really say which is the best Because I haven't played all 500 of them But There are some pretty good ones Thanks There was the last one I guess There's more You know Right You mentioned the reviews I always look at those as well But I'm a bit worried that With the amount of competition That other escape rooms May leave bad reviews That happens But at the same time It happens that those escape rooms Faker refuse them for themselves As well So that's why you have to rule out Refuse from a person who only leaves one review Or one great review And a lot of very bad reviews Yeah And that's why you need to read multiple reviews So one bad review doesn't mean Room is bad But you don't know a specific Refuse site because there are several Which you know This one where I took a lot of these numbers from All escape rooms It's a pretty good one And they actually control If one IP leaves 20 bad reviews in one day Then they probably block it Cool Thanks Still more That was not a question Anyone else Or have we answered all? Even if you have any questions After this I'm not very far away For example if you have an escape room And others also have escape rooms It could be really evil to put the solution Of another escape room you played Into your escape room So you spoiled the other escape room Actually I've seen quite some escape rooms Stealing puzzles of each other So then you join another escape room Like I've seen this before I know exactly how this works Because you can only come up with that many Amount of puzzles and new things People at least steal from each other How much stealing is there To make an escape room You visit maybe five and you get inspired By them and then you make Some stories from them or something like that The only thing I do Is when I visit a different escape room I try to analyse What works or what doesn't work So if I find A certain kind of puzzle Like a puzzle with water I will never make a puzzle with water Because that doesn't work And that's the kind of things you see In an escape room But I will probably never steal a puzzle Because it's so much fun to create your own puzzles And see people solving that And you want to have a unique experience For the people Alright We could maybe fit them one more question But we can also Finish now, nice and on time Anything really important So then, let's have a really big applause Again Thank you