A new virtual-reality venue is set to open inside The Falls shopping center in Miami-Dade this Friday, giving South Florida gamers a second full-body VR option within the same metro area. Sandbox VR will open its second Greater Miami-area location at The Falls on October 30, with four private holodecks built for group play.
The more than 4,100-square-foot venue sits at 8888 SW 136th Street, Unit 407A, according to PR Newswire. It will be operated by Immersa Entertainment LLC along with franchise operators Carolina Brost and William Santiago, who are listed as owners of the new location. Brost and Santiago said the venue aims to bring people together, create lasting memories and serve the South Florida community, per the same announcement.
Inside, the space includes four private holodecks, each able to host groups of up to six guests. Sandbox VR describes its format on its own website as room-scale, multiplayer, full-body VR, with players strapping into headsets, haptic vests and motion trackers that let them see and physically interact with one another, according to Sandbox VR. Guests also receive personalized highlight videos after each session, the company notes.
Where It Sits Inside The Falls
The venue is tucked inside The Falls mall close to the Lifetime Fitness Center, according to Sandbox VR's own location page. The Falls itself is a 55-acre open-air shopping, dining and entertainment destination in South Florida, per the PR Newswire release. Those who book online by Wednesday, October 29, can save 25% on tickets ahead of the opening.
The Falls debut follows a similar launch earlier this year in Wynwood, where Sandbox VR opened a 7,000-square-foot venue with five private VR rooms on June 10 in partnership with Solis Entertainment LLC, the company announced at the time. That Wynwood location also offered groups of up to six guests per room and a matching 25% pre-opening discount, giving Miami-Dade shoppers a direct point of comparison between the two sites.
What's on the Menu of Experiences
Sandbox VR's lineup at The Falls includes Stranger Things: Catalyst, developed in collaboration with Netflix, and the newer Age of Dinosaurs experience, built with the Natural History Museum of London and dinosaur experts, according to the company's announcement. The format has become part of a broader expansion push for the San Francisco-headquartered company, which also keeps offices in Hong Kong and Vancouver.
The Falls opening comes just over a week after Sandbox VR marked its 100th global location with a 10,324-square-foot venue at 777 7th Avenue in Times Square, which was scheduled to open October 23 with six private VR rooms and 12 full-body experiences, according to Auganix. In the same announcement covering The Falls, the company said it had recently hit $300 million in lifetime sales while scaling to 100 global locations across five continents and 13 countries — though an earlier Sandbox VR release in March had put that figure at more than 80 global locations across the same five continents and 13 countries. The company's growth figures have shifted across announcements this year: the October release tied to The Falls and Times Square cited more than 150,000 guests each month and over 6 million tickets sold worldwide, while the March release described nearly 150,000 players per month and more than 5 million lifetime players.
Backing Behind the Expansion
Sandbox VR, which launched in 2016, has raised over $70 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund, Gobi Partners, Craft and Stanford University, according to the company's own background materials distributed with the release. Individual backers named in that material include Kevin Durant, Justin Timberlake and Will Smith. The company has also been listed twice on the Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest-growing private companies and counts itself among Fast Company's most innovative companies.
Back in March, Sandbox VR said roughly 70% of its guests book visits online in advance, and that it had major expansions underway across Europe, Canada and the United States, along with a planned 25-location rollout across the Middle East with Apparel Group, per the earlier PR Newswire release. For now, South Florida visitors have two Sandbox VR venues to choose between — Wynwood and, starting Friday, The Falls.
