Epic MegaGrant Proposal · 2026

VAMOS

A unified Unreal Engine ecosystem for location-based VR.

Platform·Flagship Experience·Creator Pipeline·one live public testbed, one engine

LAZRdojo × Ctrl V — Winston-Salem's high-end VR arcade + creative studio

Larry A. Stowe, Founder & Technical Director · UNCG alumnus · Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Unity → Unreal

A full-platform engine migration, built and tested in public

Why now

A decade of location-based VR, ready to move to Unreal

Ctrl V has operated location-based VR arcades since 2016. As the franchisee behind the Winston-Salem location, we've re-launched it as one company with LAZRdojo — a training studio that turns players into creators. The entire LBE software stack still runs on Unity: it works, but it's a closed, legacy system that can't support what comes next.

10 yrs

Ctrl V franchise operating history (est. 2016)

enterprise VR stations live today

~$1M

already invested by the applicant

We are not asking Epic to start something. We are asking Epic to power the engine change.

The problem

Three problems, one root cause

🗄️

LBE software is a black box

Location-based VR runs on closed, legacy Unity toolchains. Fragmented, not social-first, no creator pathway, and invisible to the Unreal ecosystem.

🤢

Fast-paced VR triggers cybersickness

The genre Fortnite defined — speed, verticality, building — still can't exist in VR. Motion sickness remains the #1 barrier to VR adoption and session length.

🧪

Nobody has a public testbed

Comfort research happens in labs with tiny samples and single sessions. Studios test in dev rooms. No one iterates on real players, daily, at scale.

Root cause: gameplay, comfort research, hardware, and live deployment are solved by different groups who never share a room. VAMOS puts them in one building — on Unreal Engine.

The solution

One ecosystem, three layers — all built in Unreal Engine

Platform

Ruckus — Control Room UE+

Arcade operations, social VR lobbies, group launches, esports broadcast — the Unity stack rebuilt natively in Unreal. Not a launcher: a platform experience, deployable to VR arcades worldwide.

Experience

VAMOS — Flagship Experience

A VR-first, fast-paced multiplayer combat experience with an instrumented motion-comfort framework at its core. The proof that high-speed Unreal VR can work.

Pipeline

LAZRdojo — Creator Pipeline

Students learn Unreal, ship into the live arcade, and publish to FAB. Players become creators become developers.

Testbed

The 17-Station Arcade

A public venue where every layer deploys to real players, every day. One codebase, one engine, one feedback loop.

The core move

A full-platform Unity → Unreal migration

Running today — Unity

Arcade operations & session control
Social VR lobbies (functional)
Multiplayer group experiences
Booking, waiver & check-in flow
Ten years of operational learning encoded in a legacy stack

→

Rebuilt native — Unreal Engine

Control Room UE+ (17-station orchestration)
Social VR lobby with group launch & mini-games
HTC LBSS + Steam integration
Esports broadcast & cross-device spectating
Creator deployment path (LAZRdojo → arcade → FAB)

Deliverable to Epic: a documented, side-by-side Unity vs. Unreal migration case study for the entire LBE category — pipelines, performance, and developer experience, measured in a commercial environment.

Flagship experience

VAMOS: fast-paced VR combat, designed VR-first

Not a port. A ground-up answer to why games with Fortnite-level intensity have never worked in VR.

🚀

Hybrid locomotion system

Player-selectable comfort tiers — teleport, dash, smooth, arm-swing, and free-roam physical movement — blended in one framework.

🎯

Role-based pacing

Tanks, healers, snipers, rivals: intensity scales by role so players self-select their comfort and skill curve.

🧱

VR-native building & combat

Gesture and radial building systems designed for hands, not thumbsticks.

📡

Arena-scale multiplayer

Built for 17 simultaneous players on HTC Focus Vision headsets with LBSS tracking — hardware most studios never touch.

Every design decision doubles as an experiment — VAMOS is the vehicle for the research below.

The research engine

A motion-comfort framework no lab can build

Cybersickness is the field's acknowledged #1 adoption barrier — the 2020 national R&D agenda led by Stanney et al. calls for exactly the kind of large-sample, longitudinal, real-world research academic labs cannot run. Typical lab studies: fewer than 30 participants, one session, university volunteers, consumer headsets. VAMOS instruments a public venue instead.

📋

SSQ-based measurement

The Simulator Sickness Questionnaire — the field-standard instrument — built into every session.

📈

Longitudinal tolerance tracking

Habituation data across repeat visitors, at population scale.

📐

Locomotion A/B testing

Across comfort tiers, ages, and experience levels — on identical enterprise hardware.

Deliverable to Epic: an open Motion Comfort Framework for Unreal Engine — reusable locomotion and comfort-scaling systems, validated on public players and published for the community, so every developer building fast-paced VR starts ahead.

Prior art validates the approach

Others proved the pieces. VAMOS assembles the system.

Population: One

Proved battle royale, climbing, and building work in VR

Fidelity capped by standalone hardware; no comfort instrumentation

Sprint Vector (Survios)

Proved physical arm-swing locomotion lets the brain accept speed

Single mechanic; single genre; no longitudinal data

Hybrid locomotion systems

Proved multi-modal, player-selectable comfort tiers reduce dropout

Untested in fast multiplayer combat at arena scale

VAMOS operates in the untested regime: fast multiplayer combat · arena scale · public users · enterprise hardware (Focus Vision + LBSS) · instrumented, longitudinal data · Unreal Engine.

Creator pipeline

LAZRdojo: players become Unreal developers

Play

The arcade sparks curiosity

Learn

Structured Unreal training built on the Dojo Code, including Unity-to-Unreal transition

Build

Team-based production on studio-grade workstations

Publish

Deploy to the live arcade, then to FAB

20+

students active today

100–300

students trained per year at scale

20–50

Unreal projects shipped per year

FAB

publication target for student teams

AI-assisted

AI in the studio

The team and students work with AI tools across the whole pipeline — concept art and asset iteration, Blueprint and code assistance, and analysis of live playtest data. We teach it as professional craft: every shipped asset is human-reviewed, properly credited, and disclosed wherever the work is published. Students leave knowing how modern studios actually build.

Serving communities in western North Carolina that have never had access to studio-grade tools. Not just players. Creators — every graduate leaves an Unreal Engine developer.

The advantage

A daily loop no studio, lab, or engine maker has

Play

Public players run real sessions on 17 stations, every day

Measure

Comfort, behavior, and performance data captured per session

Iterate

Devs and students refine mechanics the same week

Redeploy

Builds ship straight back to the floor — no publisher cycle

Game studios solve gameplay. Hardware makers solve tracking. Labs solve sickness. Engine makers solve tools. VAMOS is the only place all four run in one continuous, public feedback loop — on Unreal.

De-risked

The infrastructure exists. The grant funds the software.

VR stations, RTX 5080/5090-class

HTC

Focus Vision headsets + LBSS enterprise tracking

workstation development studio on-site

50+

licensed titles per station, operating daily

20+

active students in the pipeline

~$1M

applicant capital already deployed

Demonstrations included with submission: a live 17-player session run through Ruckus · the Unity vs. Unreal rebuild side-by-side · a student team building, deploying, and testing on the arcade floor.

What Epic receives

Five concrete deliverables

Motion Comfort Framework for UE

Open, reusable locomotion & comfort-scaling systems validated on public players

Control Room UE+ reference platform

A deployable Unreal-native LBE operations system — a first for the engine

Unity → Unreal migration case study

Documented pipelines, performance, and developer-experience comparison from a commercial migration

VAMOS showcase experience

Public proof of high-end, fast-paced Unreal VR on enterprise hardware

A developer pipeline + FAB output

New Unreal developers and student-shipped projects entering Epic's ecosystem

12 months · milestone-gated

Four milestones, each independently verifiable

Months 1–3

Foundation

Architecture locked; core Control Room migration functional; live arcade running on the new stack in parallel.

Months 4–6

Social + Locomotion

Social VR lobby shipped; VAMOS hybrid locomotion prototype in public testing with SSQ instrumentation live.

Months 7–9

Framework v1

Motion Comfort Framework v1 published; esports broadcast and cross-device systems on the floor.

Months 10–12

Showcase + Ship

Public showcase event; migration case study delivered; first student projects published to FAB.

Funding can be tranched against these milestones. Each one produces demonstrable, on-the-floor output — not internal progress reports.

The ask

$150K to Epic — every dollar on Unreal development

Unreal engineering (lead + developer, 12 months)$90,000

VAMOS locomotion & motion-comfort R&D$20,000

HTC LBSS + Steam platform integration$15,000

Research data infrastructure (SSQ tooling, analytics)$10,000

QA, documentation & public showcase$15,000

Epic MegaGrant request$150,000

Funded outside the ask

Facility, hardware & operations — applicant capital (~$1M deployed)
Education & community programming — our nonprofit arm
Comfort research & workforce training — NSF and state grant applications in progress
Ongoing operations — arcade revenue

<15%

Epic's share of total project value — every Epic dollar is leveraged more than 6:1

No Epic funds go to hardware, rent, or operations — those are carried by applicant capital, our nonprofit arm, and pending NSF and workforce grants. The $150K buys Unreal Engine software, systems, and research — deliverables Epic keeps.

Why Epic · Why North Carolina

Strategic alignment, in Epic's home state

⇄

A flagship Unity → Unreal migration

The dominant free-roam LBE platforms run Unity-era stacks on the same HTC hardware we use — the engine is the open frontier, and we're crossing it in public.

🧩

A first for the engine

No one has built the LBE operations layer — launchers, control rooms, session systems — natively in Unreal. Control Room UE+ is that first.

📍

North Carolina roots

Unreal Engine is already taught at Atkins High School, minutes from our floor — we're the production studio those students graduate into. A UNCG-alumnus-led pipeline, 90 minutes from Epic's Cary headquarters.

🔬

Data no one else can produce

Public, longitudinal motion-comfort research that advances the whole industry — published on Unreal first.

Players become creators. Creators become developers. Developers build on Unreal.

Epic built the tools that power the future of interactive experiences.

VAMOS builds the place where they are pushed to their limits — in public, every day.

We are not asking if fast-paced Unreal VR is possible. We are building the systems that make it work.

Requested: $150,000 · 12 months · milestone-gated

LAZRdojo × Ctrl V · Winston-Salem, NC

You Are the Source

The project The crew Status board What works Build log Next

Project VAMOS // How's it going?

Early build

Here's what's real.

This is the honest page. Everything below is either running on our 17-station floor with the public, built but rough, or not started yet — and it says which.

Unlabeled footage is how early builds get oversold. Every clip below says what it is and what engine it's in.

We have a flat screen game that lets VR players play also in the same match. We will be solving some age old truths with this build. Who do you think is better?

Lots of action as we jump into our first build.

The First builds

Here we are ramping up work to start full development of Project VAMOS for the LAZRdojo x Ctrl V arcade. More video to come. Big play testing tomorrow!

Below you can find people enjoying multiplayer VR games here!

Here we are designing and placing some of our first sets pieces for the game. A lot of the level blocking out has already been done. We are going with a bright semi realistic cartoony look. We are looking to have fun making this one. Realism is great but imagination is better. Plus we have student working on this with us! I’m so proud of them.

Build log // Newest first

What changed, and when.

Add an entry whenever something lands on the floor. Keep it to what a visitor could see.

September 2026

MegaGrant application in. Movement tuning continues.

Epic MegaGrants application submitted under "Moving from Another Engine"
Locomotion director is the sole authority over player motion; network replicates its output, never raw input
Five intro assets scoped and started: torii, block, dupe, mark, silhouette

Earlier in 2026

Networked core on the public floor

17-station multiplayer running with paying customers
VR and flatscreen players in one match, shared avatar data
Server-authoritative hits with lag-compensated rewind
Stations updated to current Unity tooling for Vive Focus Vision

2025

LAZRdojo opens

17 workstation-class VR stations, padded free-roam zone, Winston-Salem
Built with Ctrl V, on their operating model

Next // The order of operations

Movement first. Then Restore. Then Unreal.

The movement system gets tuned against real matches until the off-axis frame feels like the thing the whole story promises. Then Restore — the carry that falls apart if you stop moving — because it's the mode that produces the fast play the research needs.

The Unreal rebuild starts when it's funded and when the Unity build has settled enough to be a real spec. Rebuilding a movement system that's still changing would mean rebuilding it twice.

See the project timeline

Idea World Crew Play Footage Engine Research Log Founder Join Status

LAZRdojo x Ctrl V // Project log

Vamos

A 17+ player VR and flatscreen arena shooter, built in the open on a public VR floor in Winston-Salem, to take on VR's oldest problem: fast motion makes people sick.

Early build Working: 17-player multiplayer · VR + flatscreen in one match Early: movement · story · art See what's working ›

LAZRdojo is a game-making incubator. VAMOS is its first big game — a homegrown North Carolina esport made by the people playing it right now. This page documents the whole project as it happens.

Watch the floor Book a session

v1Video 1Coming soon...

The problem // Why fast VR is rare

The motion that makes arena games good is the motion that makes people sick.

Quake-and-Unreal speed — momentum through corners, air control, real lines — has never had a proven design language in VR. Every studio that tried either slowed the game down or shipped it with an apologetic comfort menu for the players who couldn't hack the default.

We run a public VR floor. We watch this happen every week, to real people, on our own stations. So we're building the game that fixes it — and using the floor itself as the place we find out whether it works.

The idea // The comfort system is the class system

Everyone wears a block on their head. Yours decides how you move.

In VAMOS, your comfort settings aren't a menu. They're a frame — a block worn on your head, visible to everyone across the room. A frame's settings decide what motion you can do: how fast you accelerate, how hard you turn, whether you can carry speed through a corner.

Those same settings decide whether that motion makes you sick. So picking a frame is three things at once: a class choice, a movement ability, and — for our research — an experimental condition. They're the same numbers.

Nobody is choosing the "easy mode." A heavy frame is the anchor build your team needs to hold a point. A light frame goes places the heavy one can't and has a lot less to hold onto. Both are real builds, and a spectator can read them at a glance.

Everyone

Level frame

Faces square to the world. Agrees with the grid.

Stable, hard to unseat
Moves on right angles
Holds the point
Low motion, full comfort

Vam

Off-axis frame

Turned forty-five degrees. Rests on a corner.

Fast, and a lot less to hold onto
Cuts diagonals through the grid
Carries speed through corners
Goes where the map has no line

The world // New Dub City

A city built on right angles — and one kid who was never on the grid.

In New Dub City everyone is born wearing a block, and everyone wears theirs level. Streets meet at ninety degrees. Buildings stack. The civic virtue is called the Level: keep your frame straight, keep to the grid, and the ground stays under you.

Vam's block sits turned on its corner. It's not an injury and nobody's going to fix it. The kids call him Block Head. He calls himself Vam the Diamond, out loud, every time — and it changes nothing about how he's treated. He already knows who he is. He's waiting for everyone else to use the name.

Then something arrives that doesn't attack. It selects.

A district lights up inside a selection box. It's cut. A beat later it's back — wrong place, wrong scale, three of it where there was one. The Paste Squad doesn't want to destroy New Dub City. They want to organize it, and their idea of organization is duplication. Cut a block out of a city and it stops being held down. The whole place starts drifting upward.

You beat a thing that can only copy by doing something it can't copy. Nobody dies. Dupes get undone. This game has to survive a birthday party and a league night on the same floor.

⛩️

Every level starts at a torii

Two uprights and a crossbeam — structurally, a frame. Spawn point, checkpoint, portal, and the LAZRdojo mark, all one prop. Passing through one re-grounds you.

🏙️

Floating islands are canon

The city lost its ground, so the levels are disconnected blocks hanging in sky. Classic arena geometry with a reason: there's no floor left to be slow on.

🥋

LAZRdojo is the HQ

Where you train, get graded, pick your frame, and meet the crew. It survived the first cut because it was never quite on the grid either.

The crew // Early character models

Nine blocks, nine bodies. Drag to spin.

First-pass character models for the runners and the heavies. These are early — proportions, palettes, and the helmet tilt are all still being tuned against the art direction. But the silhouettes are there, and the silhouette is the whole point. Coming soon!

3D viewer not configured yet. Set window.VAMOS_MODEL_BASE at the top of this Code Block to the URL where the models/ folder is hosted (see README). Until then this section is hidden.

Model —

Loading model…

Drag to rotate · scroll to zoom

Art direction assigns each reference a job: hard-edged clarity for Vam and the environment, exaggerated heroic proportion for the crew, silhouette weight for the villains. Outlines are geometry, not screen-space — screen-space linework breaks stereo in a headset.

How it plays // Modes and classes

Short rounds. Legible from the door. Drop in, drop out.

Movement is Quake-and-Unreal lineage. Melee happens where two frames collide and destabilize each other — the mechanic threatens your frame, never your view.

Runs

Chase a cut district across the sky before it's pasted wrong.

Solo or co-op traversal, time trials against the dojo record. The mode for one walk-in and one free station.

Duels & arena

The Paste Squad only respects what it can't copy — so it makes you prove it.

Old-school arena combat, free-for-all and team. The competitive core.

Restore

Carry a stolen block back to the slot it came from.

Capture-the-flag, rebuilt. The block destabilizes if it stops moving. Standing still loses it. Our flagship team mode.

Hold the corner

Keep a re-grounded district attached while the crew reconnects it.

Objective mode. The mode where heavy frames are the stars.

Three classes, three bodies — plus one with no frame at all

The dojo grades by how much of your real body you bring. That's why one build serves every station on our floor as a story fact, not a porting compromise.

🪑

Relay

Seated PCVR. Frame assist at maximum. Entry class — anyone, first session, no clearance.

🧍

Station

Standing room-scale. Partial assist, real turning. Where most of the crew lives.

🏃

Live

Large-area free-roam. Real ground, real distance, minimum assist. Licensed dojos only.

🖥️

Deck

Flatscreen. No frame. Precise, tireless, never out on the drifting part of the city. A combatant, not a spectator.

Footage // Real people, real stations

Every build ships to a paying public within days of being written.

Footage from the LAZRdojo x Ctrl V floor. Current game build is Unity 6 on 17 workstation-class stations. Captions are set at the top of the Code Block.

From the floor

v2Video 2Coming soon...

v3Video 3Coming soon...

v4Video 4Coming soon...

v5Video 5Coming soon...

v6Video 6Coming soon...

17workstation-class VR stations on the floor

2025the year LAZRdojo opened in Winston-Salem

3play profiles from one build: seated, standing, free-roam

100sof students in reach who want to work on this game

The engine // Rebuild, not translate

It runs in Unity 6 today. We're rebuilding it in the latest Unreal Engine.

The working build proves the design. It doesn't tell us how to write it in C++. Automated conversion produces code that runs and architecture that doesn't belong — and in a project whose whole value is measurement integrity, an awkward port is worse than no port.

Now

Unity 6

Live on the 17-station public floor
Server-authoritative multiplayer with lag-compensated hits
VR and flatscreen players in the same match, same avatar data
A locomotion director that is the only thing allowed to move you — so the telemetry stays honest
Updated to the newest tools for HTC Vive Focus Vision

Native replication, native gameplay framework, native rendering
The comfort framework as a real UE plugin, free on Fab
Built for the high-end fixed hardware that VR arcades actually run
Geometry outlines and flat shading — because screen-space linework breaks stereo
Students learn Unreal on a live shipping title, not exercises

The research // The game is the instrument

There's no separate study build. Play is the experiment.

The numbers a match already records to work — which frame you're wearing, how fast you moved, how hard you turned, the gap between where you looked and where you went, when you stopped, how long you stayed, when you came back — are the study's measurements.

Labs run single sessions with volunteers. Our floor has repeat visitors, across ages and experience levels, on controlled hardware, choosing their own comfort conditions because a match is on the line. That's a dataset a lab can't assemble, and it's why university partners are interested.

The rules that don't move

Nothing rewards playing through discomfort. Not a score, a belt, or a cosmetic.
The real comfort settings are always one step away, outside the fiction, at no cost.
Running out of ground is neutral. You sit a round. The dojo treats it as normal.
Nothing implies low tolerance is a thing to train out of. The whole story argues the opposite.

Project log // Where it's going

What's done, what's now, what's next.

2025

LAZRdojo opens in Winston-Salem

Built with our friends at Ctrl V, a location-based VR franchise running since 2015. We learned from them what actually works on a public VR floor — then built the floor everything else sits on.

Unity 6 build

VAMOS multiplayer running on the public floor

VR and flatscreen in the same match. Comfort telemetry flowing. The Ctrl V lobby ready to launch it as a session option.

September 2026

Epic MegaGrants application submitted

Applied under "Moving from Another Engine" to fund the UE5 rebuild and the free Fab release of the comfort framework.

November 2026

NSF STTR Phase I

Research partnership with a regional university, using the floor's telemetry as preliminary data.

UE5 vertical slice, Fab release, first outside venue

The rebuild on the floor. The comfort framework out in the world. VAMOS running in a VR arcade that isn't ours.

From the founder // Why I'm building this

Hi. I'm a Nintendo indie developer, a contractor for the DoD and the NCAA, and I've done some work as a motion graphics designer. As a teacher, I think of game design as an experience that has to be shared with people. I became a K–12 teacher to learn more about teaching our youth, then helped create LAZRdojo with the help of my good friends at Ctrl V. I've already updated their systems to use the newest tools from Unity so they work with next-generation HTC Vive headsets — and possibly full-body trackers.

I now combine all of that accumulated knowledge to create a game at the center of my game-creation incubator, LAZRdojo, to push the fun factor while trying to solve one of VR's biggest problems: fast-paced motion.

The first phase is my first massively multiplayer VR and flatscreen game, where your mode of play affects how you play — here at the arcade. The working title is VAMOS.

LarryFounder, LAZRdojo · Winston-Salem, NC

Learn, build, create // At LAZRdojo

Calling all esports schools, colleges, and players: help us build the future.

VAMOS is being built on a public floor in Winston-Salem, in the open, with the people who play it. That's the invitation. If you run an esports program, teach game design, study how bodies handle VR, or just want to be in the room when a movement system gets tuned — there's a place for you here.

🏫

Esports schools and programs

Run VAMOS on your team's practice nights. Send students to learn Unreal Engine on a live shipping title instead of exercises. Bring a class to the floor and put a callsign on the dojo wall.

🎓

Colleges and researchers

Human factors, kinesiology, computer science, game design — the floor produces repeat-visit comfort data a lab can't. Co-author the study. Bring your IRB. Send your grad students.

🎮

Players

Playtest early builds. Tell us where the movement feels wrong. Earn belts that never reset. Every round you play is a data point that shapes what ships — and you're on the wall for it.

Partner with us Email info@LAZRdojo.com Book a session and play