Industry Insider
www.parkworld-online.com
Do the Laser Limbo!
Matt Broughton speaks to co-founder/MD and developer of Laser Limbo, Nico Uthe.
Matt Broughton: Firstly, please tell us how you came to be MD at Freeroam. Nico Uthe: I have been designing games for the location-based sector for more than a decade. The project most people in this industry know is Tower Tag, which I designed at VR-Nerds in Hamburg. I invented the game and its locomotion system, the pole-based movement that made free-roam VR shooting work without making players sick. Before Covid it did very well, largely through a distribution deal with SEGA. Covid then took the location business apart and the company bled out with it. Before that I made Lucid Trips, which was
not an LBE product at all. It was an experimental installation where we used drone motors to blow real wind at the player to simulate flight. It toured art exhibitions rather than entertainment centres, and it taught me more about physical sensation in a virtual space than anything else I have worked on. Laser Limbo started directly after VR-Nerds
closed, with a new team. I founded
freeroam.ar in Berlin together with Amir Heydarinami and Rene Korte in 2022, when the Quest 2 got video passthrough. It was black and white and low resolution, but you could already see that co-located mixed reality would fix the things VR never fixed for venues. Amir is Managing Director and runs the business side. I run design and development, and Laser Limbo is my design.
16
MB: For those not familiar, can you give us a bit of background on Freeroam and tell us what the company specialises in? NU:
freeroam.ar is an independent studio in Berlin, supported among others by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg. We do one thing, which is co-located mixed reality for commercial spaces. The game, the room-mapping tools and the Windows operator app are all built in house, so when an operator tells us something breaks in the real world we can usually ship a fix instead of putting it on a roadmap. We license Laser Limbo to location-
based entertainment venues and to event agencies, and we run our own arcade in Berlin, with a second location planned in Hamburg. Operating a venue ourselves is not a marketing exercise. It is where every release meets real paying guests, real staff and real birthday parties before it reaches a customer. And since we get asked constantly, the .ar in our name stands for augmented reality, not Argentina.
MB: Right now you're focusing on Laser Limbo; please tell us all about this. NU: Laser Limbo turns a space an operator already has into a multiplayer arena. Players wear a headset and still see the real room and each other through passthrough. We add virtual walls, laser traps, obstacles,
weapons and collectibles on top of that. Because it is augmented and not virtual, players move naturally, they stay aware of the real floor and the real walls, and they can see their friends. That sounds like a small difference. In an operating context it is a large one, because it removes most of the hesitation first-time guests have with VR and it reduces how closely staff need to supervise a session. The commercial system supports up to eight
players and is controlled from a Windows operator app. The operator picks the game mode, adjusts things like bullet speed and magazine size to suit the room, watches live stats and streams the session to a TV for the people who are waiting. There is a map editor, so the arena is shaped around the space instead of the space being rebuilt around the game. We map rooms with our own tools rather than relying on the platform room scan, which is why large and irregular layouts work, including several connected rooms. The content is a collection rather than
one game. There are ten games and game modes at the moment, covering team shooter modes, co-op modes and weapon-free modes such as a laser maze, a coin collecting run and a puzzle race. The weapon-free side matters commercially. It opens up corporate events, younger children and audiences who do not want a shooter at all, and it is the part
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER IAAPA EXPO EDITION 2026
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68
