From: Jose Elias Subject: ENT: Impressions, Boston VR Theme Park Date: 17 Aug 1993 21:22:54 GMT Organization: Boston University, Boston, MA, USA Hi everyone! This post is to give you my impressions on the newlly-opened VR theme park here in Boston, USA. The official name is "The Other Side, a Virtual Reality Arena". First of all, I was VERY dissapointed at the whole thing in many aspects. First, it was VERY dissorganized, three of us spent from 11am to 1:50pm in line just to buy a $7 ticket (which I don't see the point of, since once you're in you have to pay for ALL the attractions separetly, so we all felt cheated in that aspect), the reason for these long lines is because they totally understimated how many people were going to see this new thing, so they had only two people selling the tickets, but ended up with people in plain t-shirts helping to sell them. Also, there was a confussion with the names: in one preview video they had they showed a nice space ride with the name of "Reactor", so that's where we first went, but once inside we were shown a "AfterBurn" flight movie in a VERY small screen with moving seats, we then, like a LOT of other people, found out that "Reactor" was actually the manufacturer of the "experience"'s name!!!, also in this other ride they were showing TWO ride-movies alternativelly, but they NEVER told people that this was the case, so when I first got in line to see the space ride I was actually shown a snow-ride!!! But this is not all, the supposedly "coolest" experience (a flight sim with the sensation of gravity forces, made possible by placing the flight cavins (two of them, one at each end) on a rotary arm) stopped working and so everybody had to wait almost two hours until they fixed it (by the way, waiting time for this attraction was between 3 and 4 hours, since only two people tried it at a time for about 4 minutes), I didn't get to try this. Besides all this, I found out that the only trully interactive VR machines were the two old virtuality machines "Therodactyl Nightmare" and some really-bad-looking flight-sim, and the just mention gravity flight-sim, everything else was just sit-in-the-theatre-with-moving- -seats-and-watch kind of experience. The rest was just the Mandala system and some video games and pinball machines. The enviroment inside the improvised dome was kind of nice though, there were lasers all over the colored smoked, and lots of monitor playing computer animations (nothing new though, I actually own the tapes the showed), there were also lots of speakers, and lot's of cyber colors everyone, it felt a little bit like a dream. The only thing I'm REALLY sorry about is not how bad the whole thing was (after all, how many times have we been dissapointed at the movies?), but rather at the wrong impression people will have about what Virtual Reality REALLY is. This should concern us all because if people get a wrong impression of the what is supposed to be the real thing, then it will be harder for all of us in the future to introduce society to what the real thing is. I feel really sorry that the words "Virtual Reality" were used in this "theme park", I beleive the organizers of the event either just took advantage of the growing popularity of the term or just didn't know anything about VR. There's still hope though, I feel confident that in five years from now we'll be able to inmerse people into what we all dream of right now, and maybe the creators of "The Other Side" will still be around to do it right then, but for now we need to break the technology/price barrier if we want to do it right. Sincerely, hacker@acs.bu.edu (Jose Elias) p.s.: If you want to get into Cyberpunk Culture, try: finger hacker@acs.bu.edu or finger hacker@acs.bu.edu |more or whois hacker@acs.bu.edu or whois hacker@acs.bu.edu |more depending on which system you have. If yours doesn't support the |more extension then be prepare to stop scrolling since it's almost 5 pages long or more, and follow the adventures of.... p.s.#2: Please email comments on what you'll see! Also, the numbers that will appear in the right once in a while are the updates number, i.e.: that's where I stopped someday and continued on some other day. Enjoy!!!