MGM Grand to offer new casino VR experience

The MGM Grand is bringing to Las Vegas a virtual reality experience that will put participants inside the type of apocalyptical and fantastical video games they can play on their home computer.

MGM Resorts International has teamed up with Australia-based VR game maker Zero Latency to bring three “free-roaming” social gaming experiences to the Level Up lounge starting Sept. 8. The MGM Grand will become the seventh U.S. location to host Zero Latency games.

The Zombie Survival and Singularity games will require teams to kill zombies and robots as the they roam through what appears to be buildings and streets. Engineerum will require a team to solve physics puzzles as they move along a path in space.

The games differ from most VR experiences on the market because they are social, competitive and played over a wide-ranging space, said Andre Lawless, a U.S. marketing representative at Zero Latency.

Players see each other as digital avatars and are able to communicate with one another through the microphones. In Zombie Survival, players see each other as soldiers while in Engineerum they appear as fantasy creatures. Players can also see their individual and group scores in real time.

Many VR experiences on the market are made for individual players, limit their movement and are passive in nature. The Zero Latency games at the MGM Grand will be 30 minutes long, include up to eight players and cost $50 a person.

Alanah Pearce, an Australian YouTube blogger and a self-proclaimed VR fan, last year posted her review of the Zombie Survival game to her 113,000 subscribers.

She described the game as basic and the graphics as grainy, but she said the experience was nonetheless “epic.”

“Having a zombie run up at you when you are not expecting it and having to step back and shoot it is such a surreal thing.’’

Contact Todd Prince at tprince@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0386. Follow @toddprincetv on Twitter.