Location-based theme parks turn virtual into reality

Imagine this: You’re sitting in your office, stress is building. You need just five minutes away from it all to collect your thoughts and get a grip. You put on a head-mounted display and — ahhh, you’re surfing, rocking in your chair and shifting your feet on the carpet as you try to stay on the board. You ride out your wave of stress with a so-called “remote presence” (in this case, a live surfer in Hawaii) who rides the wild surf “with” you in 3D audio and video.

JUST YOUR IMAGINATION RUNNING AWAY WITH YOU

Of course you can only imagine such a scene, because location-based entertainment such as this is not yet available — though as they say, “they’re working on it.” Panelists at the “Location-Based Entertainment: Theme Parks and Virtual Reality” session at Digital World say that today it’s vastly expensive to create this type of individual experience. Sensors and hardware for the surfer alone are probably a cool quarter of a million dollars, never mind the cost of insuring the stuff for use in the water.

What we do get for our virtual reality (VR) entertainment dollar today is spaceships in stereo 3D crashing across a big screen, while the seats we sit in thrash, tilt and whirl about, directly linked to the action washing over us. If you thought roller coaster rides could turn your stomach, imagine a Sanrio-sponsored Hello Kitty VR theme park — it exists! — complete with piped-in smells and bad 3D.

Cash cows and movie houses. Seems rather primitive in comparison to remote surfing, but big-reputation entertainment companies such as Walt Disney, Time Warner and Iwerks Entertainment are banking on these big screen movie experiences becoming a multimillion dollar business — the movie houses of the future.

And, if you believe the figures being bandied about, there is definitely a lot of cash to be made in creating simulated worlds that thrill seekers can step in and out of at the same rate Imelda Marcos changes her shoes. “The viability of location-based theme parks is not a question. People have done their homework,” explains Scott Billups of Los Angeles-based Billups Communication, who’s working behind the scenes on several of these “rock ‘em, sock ‘em”-type venues.

The Cinetropolis network. One of Billups’s projects is with Iwerks Entertainment, on “urban movie parks” known as the Cinetropolis network. Total annual sales per center are projected at up to $15 million. The company expects to have 60 sites worldwide within two years and will unveil the first three by the end of 1993. While Billups was sketchy on the details, each Cinetropolis center would provide four different themed venues, including a big-screen experience, a “turbo tour” theater (probably for bobsled or race car “ridealongs” and the like), a 360-degree panorama music video theater, and a virtual-experience theater.

Iwerks, which has produced many large-screen science films for museums since it was founded in 1986, says only so-called “Hollywood entertainment,” such as Terminator, will be shown in the big screen rooms at Cinetropolis centers, saying “it will no longer be a film, but an experience.”

HIGH-RES, BIG BUDGET, LOW CONTENT

There are others, however, who would call it a nightmare. Not everyone is a fan of these themed venues, where the motto for entertainment seems to be the higher the resolution (and, we might add, the volume), the lower the content.

The two remaining Digital World panelists — Sally Rosenthal, producer for the Beverly Hills-based Magic Box and cofounder of big Research; and Brenda Laurel, videogame veteran, consultant for Paramount Pictures and Oliver Stone, among others, and author of Computers as Theater — both believe consumers want more out of these “experiences.” They believe group participation, control and intellectual stimulation will be more important than sensory overload.

In fact, even Billups believes what people really want out of a VR experience is to control their environment. “We are so manipulated, we are so controlled in this society that it’s nice to be able to control that media environment for just a little while,” he says.

The Audience Participation event. The point was proven at last year’s SIGGRAPH show (the leading computer graphics expo) in Las Vegas, where 5,000 people screamed their delight while they played a game of Pong en masse, on a 30-foot-by-40-foot screen. Players held up paint stirrers, each equipped with 2-inch colored squares of a highly reflective material called Reflexite, to control the action.

Panelist Rosenthal produced that installation, called Audience Participation, as the director of the Electronic Theater at SIGGRAPH, and she showed the resulting video at Digital World. Billups had been in the audience for the experience. “That was one of the most amazing and impactful VR experiences I’ve ever had, and I’ve been in damn near every virtual environment there is,” he says.

Rosenthal said that she and Loren Carpenter, creator of Audience Participation, staged the SIGGRAPH installation for less than $20,000 (though some of the materials used, and the installation space itself, were donated). In three days, 15,000 people experienced it. For contrast, one Cinetropolis center costs Iwerks $15 million, not counting the land it’s built on.

From project to product. Audience Participation was such a success that Magic Box is now helping Carpenter turn it into a product. Companies in the Fortune 500 and various rock stars have already shown interest in the prototype for use during event presentations. “That Pong game was the first time people knew that they were having individual input,” said fellow panelist Laurel, who was also a participant. “Something really electrifying happened to that crowd. It offered a paradigm where the author gets to make choices in a confined world. It was genuinely innovative.”

Others found it so innovative that Rosenthal and Magic Box are going to use the technology behind Audience Participation to build a location-based theme park (for an unidentified sponsor) in Japan. The park, which is expected to open in the spring of 1993, will revolve around a “time and space machine” experience, where groups of people will use wands with the Reflexite material attached to choose an experience from a different world or time period, such as when the dinosaurs lived.

The group’s chosen experience — majority rules, in true democratic form — will then surround them in a big-screen venue. Billups, who says he was inspired by the Audience Participation prototype, is also now working on a VR concept that will involve this kind of collective interaction and group decision making.

LOCATION AS THE THEME ITSELF

For Laurel, the concept of “location” far outweighs the concept of “theme” in her proposals for location-based entertainment. “A relationship with a natural landscape [among the native American nations],” she says, “was a principal technique for establishing the kind of emotional engagement that we yearn for in entertainment today.” This rift, she believes, can be mended through a form of location-based entertainment called surrogate travel, which offers both pleasure, and a sense and experience of something greater than ourselves.

Surrogate travel is a cinematic record of a place that provides multiple possibilities of getting from here to there. Examples include the original surrogate travel piece, the “Aspen Movie Map” done by Michael Naimark, Bob Mohl and Kristina Hooper Woolsey for the Aspen Design Conference back in 1980, where crews fanned out and filmed every street and storefront in Aspen, as well as an installation of Naimark’s that’s still at the San Francisco Exploratorium — a “fly-by” of the San Francisco Bay Area. “This form of location-based entertainment,” says Laurel, “is for people who can’t or don’t want to actually be there.”

Save the planet, make money. Laurel made a “modest” proposal at the conference, suggesting that people in the location-based entertainment industry could save the planet and make buckets of money by providing surrogate travel installations around the world.

These installations would of course never be placed close enough to a natural environment to disrupt its ecosystem. “Who knows or cares what Anaheim looked like before Disneyland?” she says. Even today the installations can be enhanced with “everything from 3D …imaging to scientific visualizations of the geological history and (possible) futures of a place,” offering surrogate travelers a much better view of the land than they would find possible through the window of their vacation Winnebago.

Another content void. In nonvirtual reality, though, what do we have today in the form of location-based entertainment? In the United States, at least, it’s theme parks with big screens and shifting seats. We are still spectators, watching the action take place away from us.

Perhaps the way to solve this content void is — yet again — to place the technology in the hands of real story tellers and creative people. Disney or Iwerks should consider funding creative institutions like the Banff Centre, where artists in residence (including Brenda Laurel, who will be there next summer working on a VR research project) can take a crack at producing the story line for a location-based entertainment theme park. Her ideas might blow us away — but emotionally and intellectually, rather than via large-scale pyrotechnics.

OTHER INTERESTING WRINKLES

The advent of home video and video rental has changed the movie business. People can now see most films quite adequately (and relatively inexpensively) at home. What you cannot get at home is the experience of the big screen, the big sound, the big effects. The logical response is that people increasingly will only pay to see “big” movies at the theater. The others they wait to see at home.

The advent of movies on-demand, detailed in other panels at Digital World, will only aggravate this effect. It may, however, redirect the priorities of the studios back toward movies that play well on a small screen, since they will now get a slice of the per-showing revenue (which they do not get in the video rental market).

In a digital world, the monster special-effect theaters may be the best remaining way to get us out of our homes and into a theater. This is the T2/Batman effect taken to its logical conclusion.

However, until there are a lot of these theaters, they will not represent a large enough market to make it worthwhile for people to produce great entertainment for them. There is a real danger that they will become the 3D or Cinerama of the 1990s: special theaters for productions that show off technical wizardry, but which are devoid of any other redeeming values.

A new pacifier for the populace? The biggest question is whether virtual reality technology is the next generation of populace pacifier, son of broadcast television. Even Laurel’s eloquent plea to leave nature to the nature lovers, and let the tourists experience it through surrogate travel technology, has its dark side. There are plenty of people who, missing the point, would ask: “If we have a perfect simulation of the Brazilian rain forest, down to the sound of the dripping dewdrops, why do we need the real thing? Let’s tear down those trees and build condos.”

In our ongoing love affair with technology we have uncovered the capability to create disposable worlds, full of simulated people, plants and animals. We must ask ourselves before these simulations become part of our reality — entrenched in our daily lives as deeply as TV is today — if they’re a good thing. Will it lessen the value of real events, just as TV news footage has become indistinguishable from the cinematic violence in the Eight o’ Clock Movie? And where will we go from there?

Janice Maloney