In the pop up, you have several things that you can do before launching the session if you choose to (none of which is required, all are optional):

1. Select the game to launch at the start of the session either by using the drop down menu or by typing in the field and selecting one of the games that come up.
2. Add or look up a customer to attached to the session
3. Add a comment
4. Record a payment
5. Choose to record and/or stream video
   
   Note that if you attach a customer to the session, you will had the additional options of adding a balance to their account or add a voucher to the session.
   
   Once you’ve entered in all the information and settings you’d like, then click on the “Start Session” button and the session will launch on all selected stations and any games you set to launch will also launch shortly after the session start:

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To switch between The Station View and the Timeline View, click on the “Timeline View” switch at the top. Note that this is a local switch and would need to be set on each of the devices that access the Your Arcade page.

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Station View:

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Timeline View:

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On the left side of the Timeline View, you’ll see all of your stations listed sorted alphabetically.

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On the left of each station is a button that will bring up station specific settings (including things like Wake-on-LAN, Station Shut Down, etc). If the station is detected as connected the color of the button will be green. Offline or is a virtual station it will show as purple. On the right side of the section will be an icon of the headset in use on that station as well as controller battery percentage.

Along the top of the Timeline View, you’ll find the different experience types you offer. You can, of course, click on each to show those stations the experience type is attached to and any bookings that use those stations. In addition, you can also click between the tabs using the Alt+[number} to switch. You can also change between them using Alt+ the left or right arrow to cycle between each experience type.

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Below the Experience Type tabs on the left side is the Walkin Mode toggle and the time display. Walkin mode will be explained a little further down in this guide. Clicking on the time display will adjust how you want your time to display in the Timeline. If you click on, for example, 15 the Timeline will show time broken out into 15 minute increments. Clicking 30 will show the time broken down into 30 minute increments, etc. This will be remembered for the next time you open the Your Arcade page.

Underneath the Experience Type tabs on the right are the buttons to allow you to page through your days. This helps you see previous or upcoming reservations without having to go to the Reservations section.

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And, of course, the main section of the Timeline View shows the sessions/reservations all broken out by station and time. Colors are determined randomly and assigned a unique color for each session so it’s easy to identify which sessions are together and which are separate. Hovering over each session block will give you details on that particular session. Clicking on a session (or clicking on the View button in the popup details) will bring up the session summary which will be discussed later.

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Scheduling: Future Reservation:

Somewhere along the Timeline, ideally close to the time you want to schedule, right click on one of the station’s timeline (again, ideally one of the stations you want to schedule for, but not a requirement). This will bring up the schedule menu. Click on the Schedule button. You can click on the X button or press Escape on your keyboard to get out of this menu.

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After you click on Schedule and once you start moving the mouse, you will be able to start putting in the session reservation. Depending on which direction you move your mouse (left and right along the Timeline) from the point you right clicked, you will be either adding time forward or time backward. Meaning that if, for example, you right clicked at 4pm and you moved the mouse to the right, you’d be adding time for after 4pm (starting at 4pm) and if you move the mouse to the left you will be adding time prior to 4pm (ending at 4pm).

If you move your mouse up or down along the Timeline, you will be able to add/remove stations within the session.

Once you’ve got a basic setup of what you want to schedule (don’t worry about being precise, you can refine later along this process), you will get the next set of options for scheduling. If everything looks good to you, click on the Schedule button at the top and that will bring up the Sell Ticket popup to complete the booking (again, you can continue to edit in that popup).

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In the bottom of this initial popup, you will have the option to pick a specific duration based on your Experience Types and Work/Business Rules. The left side will choose a duration that starts at the time on the left side, and the right side will create a duration that starts at the time on the right side of your selection.

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If you’re booking from the “All” tab, you will be given all Experience Types and times within those Experience Types (so long as you’re scheduling within the Work/Business Rules of those Experience Types).

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If you’re booking something for today, you will be given additional options to Snap Left and Snap Right. Snap Left will let you “snap” the booking to start at the end of the next session booked on that/those station(s) or immediately if you have no prior bookings. Snap Right will only be visible if you have booking on that particular station(s) and will “snap” to the beginning of the next session. Note that if you have cleaning times set in your Work/Business Rules, those will be taken into account as well.

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Final tweaks that can be applied to the booking before you go to the next step include the ability to remove a station from the booking by clicking on the red minus sign in the booking and adding a station by clicking on the big gray + button on the booking.

Additionally, if you hover over the session and you see your cursor change to a plus sign, if you hold down the mouse button while the plus sign is showing you can drag the session to the right or left to change the start time.

Once you have got all your things you wanted to set up done and you’ve clicked the “Schedule” button, this will bring up the final Sell Ticket popup to schedule and record/take payment for the session. From there, you can still change the Experience Type (1), the Duration (2), the Number of Stations (3), the Date (4), and the start time of the session (5). Additionally, here you can attached a customer to the session (6) and add a Comment (7), and, again, recording a payment (8) (or noting if it will be a Post-Paid session).

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Once you’ve made sure everything is as it should be, click on the Sell Tickets button on the bottom right and your session will be booked.
 

Scheduling a Walk In Session

To start a Walkin Session, first click on the Walkin Mode so that it is highlighted.

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At this point when you right click anywhere on the Timeline, you will be presented with a New option in addition to the Schedule. If you click on Schedule, that will open up the Sell Ticket popup and you can schedule a future session that way. If you click on the New button, you will be presented with the time on the Timeline to schedule. In Walkin Mode, time will always start now and you would be scheduling the end time.

At this point, you can do most of the same things you were able to do with scheduling a session for the future. You can apply a specific duration, you can add or remove stations from the session, and you can snap to the next session.

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Once you’ve got things the way you like them, click on the Session button (the one with the check-mark) and that will open up the Walkin session).

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Note that if you do not choose a duration within a specific Experience Type in the “Apply Duration” button or if you are not in one of the Experience Type tabs at the top, you will be prompted to choose which Experience Type to use before the Walkin popup will appear.

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The post VR Session Manager – Timeline View appeared first on Synthesis VR.

If you don’t yet have any employees, you definitely would have to hire some as your business grows. Then, you would create them “Operator” SynthesisVR accounts, as you wouldn’t want them to have full control over your setup. With this, certain functionalities would be limited. To name few:

• They wouldn’t be able to set custom reservation cost (something you can do as arcade owners)
• They wouldn’t be able to delete reservations that are already “Used”

As we are all humans, your employees would do mistakes from time to time and you would be the one that would supervise and take care to “fix” their mistakes. In the regular case, your employees would let you a reservation comment, so you can take care for it. With the business growth, you may end up having 20, 30, 100+ reservations per day and it may become difficult and time consuming to check the comments one by one. However, if your staff add a comment and add a label to the reservation, you would be able to take care significantly faster. We are sure you would be able to think of more usage cases and we are eager to hear them.

How to create Tags

1. To create Reservation Tags go to Administration – Advanced Settings – Extras (tab) – Tags
   
2. Click the Three Dot button on the Top Right and click Add New Tag as shown below

3. Select your location, Give a Title that is relevant and select a color and Save

Adding A Tag to an existing Reservation

1. Open Any existing reservation and click Assign Labels and select the Desired Tag.
   
2. Once the Tag is selected it will be assigned to the respective reservation. Multiple tags can be selected for the same reservation.
   
3. You can also Filter existing reservations by Tags, An easy way to find what you are looking for.
   

The post VR Session Manager – Session Tags appeared first on Synthesis VR.

“Experience Add-On” is a purchasable add-on for Synthesis VR Essential Access .

Modules & Add-Ons are purchasable features that increase the functionality and capability of the Synthesis VR platform.

The “Experience Add-On” allows you to create and manage custom VR Session Types..

Additional Notes:

• The Experience Types Add-On is built on top of the VR Session Manager Module, which is required.
• The “Experience” Add-On and “VR Session Manager” are purchasable with free credit

1. From the Left Menu – Click Administration – Arcade Setup – and then click on the “Experience Types” button.

2. Click on the “New Experience Type” button on the left and then fill the information in the popup.

4. Click on the “Enable For VR Arcades +” button and that will add a drop down menu choice allowing you to choose which arcade location(s) you want this particular Experience Type to be available. If you have more than one arcade/location, you’ll need to add multiple locations by clicking the “Enable For VR Arcades +” button again for as many locations as you have. You will then click on the drop down menu to choose each location.

5. Enter in the title of the Experience Type in the “Title” section. Enter in the description of the Experience Type in the “Description” section. Note that the description will appear in your online booking widget, so keep it informative and concise.

6. Define the charge method: Here you can select in what method you prefer to change for the particular experience type. You can either charge by stations or for the experience, whereas the party booking come into play.
7. Show as Book Now option – Enable this if you want customers to Book Online using SynthesisVR booking widget.
8. Desktop Communication: Default value should be set to Yes unless using it for Virtual Stations which is not the default case.
9. Position On The List – If you’d like your Experience Types sorted manually, you will want to enter in the number position within the list you want this Experience Type listed within the “Position On The List” section. Sorting manually will allow you to see them in a specific order when making a reservation and through online bookings, etc. This section is not required and if left blank, Experience Types are sorted by when they were entered.
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10. If you’ll be using SynthesisVR to initiate recordings in this particular experience type, choose “Always Capturing” or “Disabled, but can be turned on by the operator” in the “Video Recording On File” drop down menu, otherwise leave it at “Disabled” to not allow video recording.
11. If this Experience Type should only be available to Admins, choose yes from the drop down menu in “Only Visible To Admins”, otherwise leave it at “No”.
12. On enabling “Pause session on HMD Idle” the session will be automatically paused on being idle and will resume on moving again.
13. Intro Video and Outro Video – If you want customers to watch a certain video before the start of this experience and after the end of an experience, give the necessary URL on these fields.

14. The minimum number of stations that can be booked for the particular experience can be defined using Minimum number of stations in a session.

15. The maximum number of stations that can be booked for the particular experience can be defined using Maximum number of stations in a session.

16. Difference in minutes on the calendar allows you to decide the time difference in between the booking slots.

17. If this Experience Type is for all stations, then choose “Yes” from the “Complete Stations Booking” drop down menu. This will be most useful for walk in sessions for a full venue and will save a few steps. This would also be good for online bookings for full venue reservations. If this is for individual stations or anything less than the full venue booking, then choose “No” from the drop down menu.

18. Once you’ve entered in all the necessary (and optional) sections, you will see that the “Save” button is now solid and clickable. Click that to save, otherwise your edits will be lost. If you want to exit and start over click the tiny “x” button in the top right of the window or click the “Hide” button at the bottom of the window.

The post Experience Types Add-On – Custom VR Session Types appeared first on Synthesis VR.

To create a game category navigate to Administration>> Business Setup >> Games, Categories, Licenses.

Followed by clicking on the Categories tab:

To create a new category, click on the large New Category button. This will bring up a new game category window.

• Title: This will be the name of the Game Category and will be visible to your customers.
• The List Type will determine if this Game Category is always visible, is optionally visible (determined at session start on a per station basis), is restricted from showing (specific to the games in this Game category), or optionally restricted (determined at session start on a per session basis). More on the Restricted Game Categories further down.
• Use as Home Screen will set this Game Category as the default one the customer will be taken to when they bring up the menu.

To add games to the Game Category, you can either double click on the games displayed in the left column or drag them from the left column to the right space. Note that the list on the left can be searched using the search field at the top (and additionally, this list only displays games discovered to be installed on your stations). If you are building a Game Category of all your games, you can simply click on the “Assign all your installed games”:

To organize the order your games displayed in you simply need to click and drag the games within the right hand list. Alternatively, if you want them in alphabetical order you can click on the “Sort Alphabetically” button.

Once done, click on the Save button at the bottom.

At this time, you have only created a game category and it is not connected to anything else. To have it shown to customers, you need to assign the Game Category to one or more of your Work Rules. You can refer to this article for Work Rules within Operation Settings: https://synthesisvr.com/knowledge-base/work-rules-by-duration/

Note that you can also reach the Work Rule by clicking on it where it shows it is Assigned in the Categories section:

When you are in the Work Rule, head to the Games tab and simply click on the Assign Game Categories + button to add more Game Categories or click on the red x to remove game Categories. Using the drop down on each Game Category allows you to choose which one will show.

Note that the order the Game Categories show in this section is the order they will display for the customer in the headset.

Enforced vs Optional

If you create an Available Games – Enforced Game Category, then when you assign the Game Category will show in every session that the Game Category is assigned to.

If you create a Restricted Access – Enforced Game Category, then when you assign this Game Category to a Work Rule, all games in this Game Category will be hidden in any other Game Categories are assigned to that Work Rule. This is most helpful if you want to create different Work Rules with the same Game Categories as your other Work Rules, but don’t want to go through and create different Game Categories to remove individual games and you can just add this Restricted Game Category to the Work Rule.

If you create an Available Games – Optional Game Category and assign it to a Work Rule, than you are able, on a station by station basis, decide to include that category or not in the session. Note that at the start of a session, the Available Games – Optional categories will be selected by default and must be UNCHECKED to have them not show.

If you create a Restricted Access – Optional Game Category and assign it to a Work Rule then you are able, again on a station by station basis, decide to essentially hide the games in this Game Category from a specific station. Note that at the start of a session, the Restricted Access – Optional categories will be unselected by default and must be CHECKED to hide games in this category.

In the below image, the “Easy” Game Category is set to Available Games – Optional and the Medium is set to Restricted Access – Optional. Again, each station can have different options chosen at the start of a session.

You can also assign games directly from the game itself. From the Your Games tab in the Games, Categories, Licenses section click on any game and go to the Categories tab:

From there you can Enable or Disable a Game Category that a game is assigned to. Once finished, click on the Save button at the bottom. Note that a Game Category must have at least one game assigned to it prior to using this method. You can use the drop down number on the right of an Enabled Game Category to assign where in the list the game should show up.

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