From: Richard M Harrison Subject: ENTERTAIN: VR Entertainment Systems Organization: Australian National University Can anyone give me some information on the VR games and installations now in the USA? I am interested in any or all of the following: the types of games (overview of environment, characters, behaviour of computer controlled characters and objectives), the manufacturing company, the hardware on which the game runs, the cost to the public per experience (or do some of these VR theme parks just charge an entrance fee?) and personal opinions on such game qualities as: level of detail and realism (or surrealism), playability (is the game enjoyable and immediately involving or will the average person be discouraged by their initial ineptitude when confronted by difficult controls and confusing displays?), lasting appeal and breadth of appeal (I expect photo-realistic jet fighter simulators would leave the major part of the potential market untapped.) Technical details (or estimates) such as frame rates, display resolution and field of view would also be most helpful. I've heard of systems using hardware such as the SGI Crimson Reality Engine. While the companies marketing these products probably acquired the machines for considerably less than the $90,000 list price, it would still seem that you would need a lot of people to pay a considerable price per experience to make a reasonable return on such a rapidly depreciating investment. Finally, next year I will be putting together a VR system to run software I am currently developing. At this stage I'm considering the SGI Indigo2 Extreme. The more expensive graphics systems such as VGXT and Reality Engine can be fitted with a VideoSplitter which allows the framebuffer to be divided and multiple video outputs to be derived from a single graphics pipeline but no such product is currently offered for the Indigo2. If anyone has used an Indigo2 with a HMD or has ideas on how it might be achieved at reasonable cost I'd be most interested to hear from them. I'd also appreciate information on other VR systems in this price range (US $20,000 - $50,000) which would provide similar or superior computational and rendering performance (Rapid Gouraud shading is essential, but I can live without texture mapping for the moment) and of companies which assemble such systems. Thankyou, Richard Harrison. Australian Centre for the Arts and Technology, Australian National University. richardh@feline.anu.edu.au [The October 1993 issue of "Game Players Nintendo-Sega" (ISSN-1068-1809) carries a nearly complete article on entertainment systems, entitled "TechTalk Special: Virtual Reality Mindgames," by Vince Matthews. Of course, it does not give details on the hardware/software used -- Aaron, co-mod.]