Welcome to Lowpass! This week: Two Bit Circus incubates a mixed reality theme park, and Roku is able to surpass one of its major competitors on its own platform.

Dreampark is a theme park only you can see

If you happen to find yourself exploring 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica these days, you may stumble across something odd: People wearing Meta Quest headsets, jumping from one spot to the next to avoid invisible obstacles, kicking things that aren’t there, or reaching up as if they were grabbing hidden treasures our of thin air – and you may wonder: What the heck is going on?

The answer, in short: Those people are visiting Dreampark, an invisible mixed reality theme park overlaid over tens of thousands of square feet of public space. After buying a $10 ticket, Dreampark attendees get handed a Quest 3s headset that allows them to play The Floor is Lava and other mixed reality games on the Promenade – all while the general public strolls around them.

Dreampark has been developed by Future Circus, a new mixed reality venture launched by AR house co-founder Aiden Wolf and Brent Bushnell, whose micro amusement park Two Bit Circus has been aiming to reinvent theme parks and arcades since 2012.

VR has long been a part of that, Bushnell told me when we recently chatted about Future Circus. “I had a near-total adult life obsession with VR, from the moment the Oculus kickstarter happened,” he said. Two Bit Circus built some early VR explorations for companies like Dave & Busters and Samsung, and has been incorporating select VR experiences into its Los Angeles arcade for years.

As part of those efforts, Two Bit Circus has also been exploring ways to use mixed reality headsets. One early demo involved people riding Drift Trikes (think tricycles for adults) through a mixed reality obstacle course. “[Players] could see coins to collect, barriers to avoid, gates to go through,” Bushnell said. “You still saw the parking lot, but you had all these augmented features.”

Having worked in location-based entertainment for over a decade, Bushnell was sure he had seen it all – until he tried the trike himself. “This was the first time where I [thought]: Holy sh*t, this is heart-stoppingly amazing! When I took the headset off, my heart rate was at 140,” he told me. “It really cracked me open for what is possible with mixed reality.”

Those early demos also helped Bushnell realize that mixed reality headsets make it possible to sidestep key obstacles of other immersive technologies: By anchoring experiences in the real world, and relying on the physical motion of players, games can do away with the motion sickness that many people still experience in VR. And pass-through video allows for much more immersive experiences than prior-generation AR wearables like Microsoft’s HoloLens or Magic Leap’s eponymous headset.

“Those always failed to deliver on the enthusiasm, because you're looking through this tiny little postage stamp, and everything normal around it is taking you out of the immersion,” Bushnell said. “When it’s your whole view [in a mixed reality headset], it’s so much better.”

Dreampark opened in Santa Monica in mid-February, and offers mapped experiences across some 30,000 square feet. “You go down the whole promenade, and come up the other side,” Bushnell said. “The trees, because they are mapped into the space, have funny fake signs hanging on them.”

But Santa Monica is just step one. Future Circus recently began working on bringing its games to San Francisco, and has plans to eventually offer what Bushnell called downloadable theme parks. These could make use of public spaces everywhere as long as they share a similar layout. “Think of the format of every soccer field and basketball field: That is a platform across the country that is a reliable form factor, that’s unimpeded space,” he said. “There are so many fun ways to run from here.”

Roku beats a major streaming competitor

Roku CEO Anthony Wood revealed an interesting tidbit at Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media & Telecom conference this week: The Roku Channel, the company’s own ad-supported streaming service, has become the second-most-viewed app on the company’s smart TVs and streaming players this quarter.

Who did Roku beat, you might wonder? A Roku spokesperson I contatced for this story wouldn’t say, but it really comes down to two apps: Netflix and YouTube have long been the most popular services on the service. However, to the company and its investors, it may not make much of a difference which one of these two got knocked off the throne. That’s because both of them have been obstacles to Roku’s ad revenue growth.

Roku has long required third-party publishers to hand over a share of their ad inventory and / or subscription revenue in exchange for distribution of their apps on its platform. Two notable exceptions from that rule have been Netflix and YouTube, which through their sheer size were able to play hardball with Roku. Here’s how the company put it in its 2024 annual report last month: “For certain apps, including YouTube’s ad-supported app, we have no access to video advertising inventory at this time, and we may not secure access in the future.”

This has long been a major sore spot for Roku. But with the growth of the Roku Channel, it’s becoming less of an issue, as a review of Roku’s regulatory filings over the years shows:

• When Roku went public in 2017, it told investors that Netflix alone was responsible for one third of all streaming hours on Roku devices, with the top five channels accounting for around 70 percent of all content streamed.

• In its 2018 annual report, Roku acknowledged that “Netflix and YouTube accounted for a majority of all hours streamed,” while also specifying that YouTube was the “second most viewed channel overall” on its platform.

• In its 2019 annual report, the company stated that “the top three streaming services represented over 50% of all hours streamed,” suggesting that Netflix and YouTube weren’t by themselves responsible anymore for the majority of all streaming hours.

• Roku’s disclosures were virtually the same for the following years. Things changed in its 2023 annual report, when “the top three streaming services represented almost 50% of all hours streamed” (emphasis added).

• And in 2024, Roku clarified that “the top three streaming services (excluding The Roku Channel) represented almost 50% of all hours streamed” – an addition necessary because The Roku Channel became the third-most-watched channel on the platform last year.

All this indicates that The Roku Channel has steadily been growing its share of viewing hours at the expense of revenue share holdouts like Netflix and YouTube.

Wood also revealed how the company is achieving this growth: By plugging The Roku Channel everywhere on its platform. 80% of all viewing on The Roku Channel now comes from people who don’t click on the app icon, but arrive at it through content recommendations within the Roku UI, he said.

What else

How Audiomack became an unlikely Spotify competitor. My latest for Fast Company is a look at Audiomack, which serendipitously became the biggest streaming service in West Africa.

Amazon will launch new Alexa devices this fall. That’s according to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, as per Bloomberg.

YouTube launches premium lite tier. The new $7.99 plan will do away with ads for “most videos,” but not include downloads or ad-free Shorts or music videos.

Prime Video starts testing AI-aided dubbing. With just 12 movies, this seems to be as much about gauging Hollywood’s reaction as testing the capabilities of AI.

Talks about a potential TikTok sale have yet to start. TikTok has less than a month left, but potential buyers don’t even know who to talk to.

Discord is looking to go public. An IPO could happen as early as this year, according to the New York Times.

Technicolor Games to be sold to Transperfect. The fate of other Technicolor units is still uncertain following the company’s bankruptcy.

That’s it

I used to be one of those people who would give social media sites the wrong birth date for somewhat dubious privacy reasons — and then have friends congratulate me out of nowhere on a random day in June for years. Wait, did I say used to be?

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend!

And many thanks to Whale TV for sponsoring this issue of Lowpass.