NSF STTR Phase I
Research partnership with a regional university, using the floor's telemetry as preliminary data.
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.
Workingon the floor, with the public
Earlybuilt, still rough
Plannednot started
Last updated: September 2026. Current engine: Unity 6. Target: the latest Unreal Engine 5.
Status board // Every system, one honest label
What's working, what's early, what's next.
The networked core is done and public. Movement, story, and art are where the work is right now — which is the right order, because you can't tune a movement system without real players in a real match.
Working
17-player multiplayer
Every station on the floor in one match. Running with paying customers.
Working
VR and flatscreen in the same match
Headset players and desk players share one avatar representation, so hit resolution never branches on player type.
Working
Server-authoritative combat
Hits resolve on the server with lag-compensated rewind. No client decides whether it landed.
Working
HTC Vive Focus Vision on the floor
Stations updated to current Unity tooling for the next-generation headsets. Full-body trackers under evaluation.
Early
Movement system
The locomotion director — the one thing allowed to move you — is in. Frames, dash, blend, and the speed-through-corners feel are still being tuned against real play.
Early
Comfort telemetry
Match data is being captured. The consent flow and the anonymized pipeline for the research study are still being built out.
Early
Story: New Dub City
Vam, the Level, and the Paste Squad are fully designed on paper. In-game, only the intro assets exist so far.
Early
Art build-out
Five intro assets scoped, plus nine first-pass character models — spin them here. The Mega Man / Battle Chasers split isn't locked yet.
Early
Duels & arena mode
The core round loop runs. Rulesets, scoring, and spectator view are rough.
Planned
Restore, Runs, Hold the corner
The three objective modes. Restore — the carry that destabilizes when you stop — is first, because it's the one the research needs most.
Planned
Launch from the Ctrl V lobby
The arena lobby works today for other games. VAMOS isn't wired in as a session option yet.
Planned
Unreal Engine 5 rebuild
Nothing exists in Unreal yet. The Unity build is the spec. Funding application submitted September 2026.
Planned
Comfort framework on Fab
The free plugin for other Unreal developers. Depends on the UE5 rebuild.
Planned
Belts and progression
Callsigns and belts that carry across visits. Design done; nothing built.
Planned
Large-area free-roam (Live class)
The padded zone exists. The LBSS colocation setup for headset-to-headset play in it does not yet.
What works // Show, don't tell
Proof from the floor.
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.
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
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
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 timelineLAZRdojo 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 sessionv1Video 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!
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
Next
Unreal Engine 5, current release
- 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.
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.
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.
Epic MegaGrants application submitted
Applied under "Moving from Another Engine" to fund the UE5 rebuild and the free Fab release of the comfort framework.
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.