In August 2016, Scene75 Entertainment Center in Dayton announced Ohio's first virtual reality arcade, bringing room-scale VR to a mainstream family entertainment venue at a time when most consumers had never tried a headset.
The arcade offered walk-in VR sessions on high-end hardware that was still far too expensive for most households — an HTC Vive with a capable gaming PC cost well over $2,000 at 2016 prices. Location-based VR arcades like Scene75's became the first contact many people had with immersive content, and the format spread rapidly across the US in the following years.
Scene75, which grew into one of the largest indoor entertainment center chains in the Midwest, still lists this launch among its press milestones. The consumer hardware wave that followed — Quest 2, Quest 3 and PSVR2 — eventually brought that arcade-grade experience home.
Condensed from our original coverage.