Boggy Creek Airboat Adventures Now Open: Boggy Creek goes even bigger in VR
Following the success of the attraction’s first foray into VR for B2B sales, Boggy Creek Airboat Adventures has worked with Starmark to expand its footprint in VR. What we’re calling Boggy Creek 2.0 includes an overhauled sales experience for travel planners and made it publicly accessible for the first time.
Improving on a winning formula
The original version of the Boggy Creek VR experience was created as a way to bring Boggy Creek to travel planners around the world during the travel disruptions of the global pandemic. Now on the heels of a Best in Show win at the 2023 Flagler Awards, the new version of Boggy Creek VR launches to the public.
Taking Boggy Creek to the wider world
While this new and improved version is still primarily used as a tool to book more group sales, it will also be persistently available as a meta theme park within the Engage Metaworld. Now visitors from any continent can visit Boggy Creek in VR before deciding to come in person.
Like version 1.0, this new version is still anchored by our two-minute airboat experience, where visitors can sit in a scale recreation of one of the airboats for a VR-enhanced video showing all the park has to offer. As the video plays, VR airboats zoom across the Everglades waters in front of the viewer, gators gather around the boat and butterflies flutter past.
The Starmark team also added VR recreations of signage throughout the grounds, like education about Everglades birds, a history wall about Kissimmee and a gator guide photo op.
More lifelike than ever
Boggy Creek VR 2.0 takes advantage of additional optimizations to create a lifelike experience that runs great on widely available headsets, like the Meta Quest 2. On more powerful VR devices and desktop versions of Engage, the visual fidelity is even higher. Hear birds chirp in 360 degree sound, listen to the wind, watch the sun disappear behind trees and beams. It all adds up to an experience that’s more immersive than before.
Animal trainers and educational experiences
The new Boggy Creek VR 2.0 features completely new interactions for visitors — and some major enhancements to current ones. The previous version included a butterfly garden, but the new version more realistically captures the in-park experience with a screen-enclosed setting full of accurate recreations of the native Florida plants that serve as food sources. Several different species of butterfly are represented, showing the incredible variety of species native to the state.
Similarly, throughout the park, watchful VR visitors will see other native species, like the birds that make the park their home in real life.
And speaking of critters, Starmark also overhauled the Alligator area, creating an enclosure more like the one visitors experience at the Kissimmee attraction — as well as adding lots more immersion to the fossil and gem mining flume. Now visitors can really hear the water rush — and even pick up the gems.
The Starmark team also added real Boggy Creek animal trainers to this version. Visitors can give themselves a self-guided tour of the attraction by launching dimensional avatar recordings that are modeled after the real animal trainers at the park.
This is one of our most immersive VR projects to date. We’ve loved the opportunity to work with such a forward-thinking partner, and we can’t wait to see how we can bring more and more business opportunities to life through VR.
— Brett Circe, Starmark Chief Digital Officer
A real-world reward for VR visitors
To publicize the public launch, Starmark created a new page about this VR experience on the Boggy Creek website, as well as organic social assets the park’s team can add to its feed. It’s all part of our effort to create a stronger connection between the virtual world and the real one. In fact, when you go check out Boggy Creek in VR for yourself, you’ll see we’ve included a way to win a real-life reward for your real-life tour of Boggy Creek hidden within the VR experience — namely a coupon code for a free gem and fossil mining experience. This new addition provides a clear way to track engagement between the VR experience and real visitors at Boggy Creek.
The Boggy Creek VR Experience is available on every major VR headset (including the new Meta Quest 3), Mac, PC and Chromebook computers. You can also access it on phones and tablets running the Engage iOS and Android app. You can always find the entrance to Boggy Creek on the top floor of the Enterprise plaza in the Engage Metaworld.
