The "location-based" VR pioneers are poised to capture new ground, aided by a new recruit...Disney.
Goggleheads, they call us. "They" think virtual reality comes in one flavor - Goggles&Gloves - and smirk when we wax poetic about VR's potential. Maybe they're unaware of a team of synthetic-digital environmentalists led by Merchant Marine Academy drop-out Jordan Weisman and Walt's grandnephew, Tim Disney. These guys know you don't need a helmet to stick your head in cyberspace. All you need is a ticket to the realm of VR dubbed "location-based entertainment."
Location-based entertainment blends amusement park ride and videogame, adds a storyline, and serves it up via computer-based graphics, sound, input and display technologies. No helmets required, just "pods," or cockpits installed in a thematic setting, beckoning passengers to virtually soar into bit-borne fantasy worlds.
Chicago's Virtual World Entertainment (VWE) is aggressively peddling this flavor of VR - sometimes known as second-person virtual reality (as opposed to first-person or immersive). VWE's ability to mass-market its product results from Disney's ingredient. Last December he poured a reported $10 to $15 million into VWE, inspiring a Variety editor to pen the head, "Tim Disney Gets Dose of Reality."
Hollywood didn't laud VWE's creators when they conceived the concept in 1980. No one did. VWE sprouted from the twisted minds of Jordan Weisman and his Academy classmate Ross Babcock, who spent their teens engrossed in Dungeons & Dragons. A dyslexic, Jordan delved into fantasy role- playing games because they offered "a big impetus to read." He spent his bar mitzvah money on an Apple II. In 1979, Jordan and Ross realized that combining role-playing games with PCs could create a new kind of entertainment.
"Role-playing games require lots of reading and imagination, and not many people are willing to put that effort into their entertainment," Jordan says. "But everyone always wanted to hear the stories of our games. Our friends knew all about our character, as if we were the heroes in a movie. Then, at the Academy, I visited a simulator used to train pilots, a $100-million complex with computers the size of a house. It struck me that if you put enough Apple IIs in one place and networked them, you could achieve that kind of simulation for much less money. Then you could create a collective audio-visual experience that was as empowering but more popular than role-playing games, and people could become the stars of their own movies."
The affable dreamer Jordan and the analytical Ross created the "BattleTech" storyline about a futuristic military zone. In Chicago, after leaving the Academy, the two 19-year-olds founded Environmental Simulation Projects (ESP) to create a BattleTech simulation game system. They tried to raise money, failed repeatedly, and so decided to get rich and build BattleTech themselves. With $150, they launched another company, FASA (for Fredonian Aeronautics & Space Administration, a name meaningful to Marx Brothers' Duck Soup fans). FASA published BattleTech as a board game. By 1987 FASA was the world's second largest role- playing game company.
Jordan attributes FASA's success to its approach. The role-playing game industry grew out of military simulations; its products are "realism- and rule-driven." FASA instead emphasized "the creation of a world. We designed games by starting with a geopolitical situation and crafting an environment that breeds heroes. We explored what those heroes did and wore, what vehicles and weapons they used. The story attracted people."
In 1987 Jordan and Ross started investing FASA profits in R&D for their original ESP simulation project. In 1989, when "virtual reality" attained buzzword status, they changed ESP's name to Virtual World Entertainment. A year later they opened BattleTech Center. It featured sixteen networked cockpits that allow teams to wage war in a simulated BattleTech environment, a virtual world seen on video screens and experienced both inside and outside the cockpits. Billed as the world's first "location-based virtual reality entertainment center," BattleTech Center (recently renamed Virtual World Center) sold 300,000 tickets in two years. Last August, Jordan and Ross brought BattleTech to Japan. The 32-cockpit Yokohama BattleTech sold 30,000 tickets in the first month.
People with the name "Disney" can appreciate the significance of these feats. Tim Disney is a Harvard graduate (class of 1983) with a fine arts degree. After writing for Walt Disney Studios, then creating a Comedy Central game show, he invested in fun-oriented VR last December: VWE was his beneficiary. Today Tim is the company's chairman of the board. Joining him to help Jordan and Ross run VWE are Andrew Messing (formerly with Shamrock Holdings, a Disney money firm) and Charlie Fink (formerly a Walt Disney Pictures VP). They plan to turn VWE into a diversified entertainment enterprise befitting their collective Midas touch.
The original Virtual World Center inhabits a shopping mall in Chicago. For $7 you can enter this networked simulation of 31st-century humanoid fighting machines, called "BattleMechs." After a training and strategy session with uniformed BattleTech officers, you climb into a slick- looking, enclosed pod containing a fighter-plane seat, festooned dash, and two color display screens; that's your 'Mech. You wage a ten-minute war against other players driving other 'Mechs, talking to your teammates by microphone. Team members cooperate to accomplish a mission. All games are recorded for database storage so BattleTech can track your proficiency and promote you to higher game-play levels. At the end of the game, you get a printout of your actions and watch a Mac Quadra- driven display of the game - physical validations of your virtual experience.
Behind BattleTech is a complex network of PCs. Concealed inside each pod are five custom Texas Instruments- and Motorola-based computers that handle game and simulation code, I/O, graphics, and sound. Five speakers in the cockpit pump out twelve independent channels of sound effects. The pods' on-screen graphics show accurate renderings of the virtual world, including light sources and 3-D perspectives. To optimize computer power, the pods' display system doesn't redraw each 'Mech during gameplay. Instead, it immediately selects and flashes an appropriate image from a collection of 'Mech pictures. Outside the pods, a hot-rodded Quadra on the network serves as the Operator's Station; players poke its touch-screen before game-play to customize their adventures. VWE originates all programming (written in C), engineering, and artwork.
In BattleTech, "interactive" means pitting your skills against others' skills, not a computer, and not limiting your actions to a few pre- programmed paths. You have options: hide behind trees, duck under rocks, scramble into buildings. No two games ever play the same way. And "immersive" means sensorial inclusion in actual and computer-generated BattleTech environments. The center's entire design supports the illusion of being in a place far, far away from a shopping mall.
The Virtual World Center has spawned a subculture of Chicago twenty- somethings, some with legendary status in "BattleTech Society" - regulars who go by such gaming names as Elvis, Poet, Hitman, and Maddog. Jordan says, "When all of you come out of a cockpit, you have shared an experience and you talk about it. You enter the environment with strangers and come out with friends. That's part of the attraction."
Sure, but who does it attract? BattleTech is fueled by testosterone; few players are female. When Jordan and Ross developed BattleTech, they saw so many risks in the overall concept that they decided the content should capitalize on the proven notion that most young males enjoy seek- and-destroy games.
Now that Jordan and company know their format appeals to a certain group (average age is 24.5), they're ready to try different approaches. "We're now creating an environment that is less intimidating, that from its very essence isn't exclusionary," Jordan says. "We also decided to create a theme that isn't dedicated to one storyline. The story starts in 1860 and comes up to present day. It's about an organization that unites explorer-adventurers with scientists in a quest to explore worlds beyond earth. We wove about 100 real-life historical personages into the story. The milieu shifts from the military BattleTech to a place based on exploration and discovery." The new VWE centers thus will offer different "adventures" within this single-theme environment.
These Centers open this summer in New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, the San Francisco Bay Area (Walnut Creek), and the Southwest. The Walnut Creek center opens first, in June. It's not too far from the NASA Ames Research Center where, in 1987, some goggleheads had the idea of combining a head-mounted display and data glove with 3-D sound, position-tracking, and multimedia data in the "Virtual Interactive Environment Workstation."
At first Jordan and Ross considered using helmets, but head-mounted displays limit movement and suffer from low resolution, time lag, and choppy frame rates. Besides, a big challenge in creating virtual worlds involves making participants forget about the technology and consider the environment "real." Jordan and Ross figured pod-based VR better supports this suspension of disbelief. Pod-based VR, says Jordan, also is less intimidating "because you don't have to put something on your body. Plus, when you're 25 years old, looking stupid is the worst thing in the world."
There's nothing stupid about the new Virtual World centers. Unlike the cold, gray-hued military setting of the original center, these have the ambience of a Victorian explorer's club: overstuffed leather chairs, woodwork, and the requisite high-tech elements. Jules Verne meets Blade Runner. No longer war-like in appearance, the pods are streamlined "transportation devices," as Jordan likes to call them. "The pilot gets in, hits a button, and the cockpit takes off into the other world and morphs into whatever it needs to be for that world" - either a 'Mech for BattleTech or a Martian pickup truck for the new "Red Planet" racing and exploration game.
What's next? R&D continues at Chicago headquarters. Hollywood's waiting to see how the Disney heritage of creativity will come into play here. Technologically speaking, Ross and his technoids aim for better graphics resolution, greater color depth, and higher frame rates. They see future Virtual World centers boasting new kinds of immersive technologies, quality texture mapping, and motion platforms.
Meanwhile, VWE brass are power-lunching with movie and TV studios, publishers, videogame makers and toy manufacturers, inking deals to exploit the BattleTech title. Soon to come: comic books, cartoons, and the kinds of chotchkes that swelled the coffers of the creators of Bart and Barney. In the next three years, 30 Virtual World centers will open in Japan alone. All centers will be networked, so New Yorkers and Japanese can challenge each other ("telegame"!) in the same virtual world. Jordan predicts inter-city tournaments by year's end. Globally televised Virtual World Series games, anyone?
"Our goal," Jordan says, "is to create a legitimate entertainment format - something that, given time and technological growth, will give movies a run for their money. To do that it must be interesting to adults, with a story to escape into, not just something to eye/hand-coordinate and master."
Herein lies one concept stoking VR development: the potential to produce entertainment in which the audience determines outcome in a meaningful way, engaging in conflict and resolution within a teamwork atmosphere. Virtual World centers present the tip of this iceberg. So what if they don't use goggles and gloves to place you in cyberspace? As VR researcher Carrie Heeter writes in the VR journal Presence: "Second- person VR [requires] an almost outrageous leap of faith to transfer [the player] into a world on the screen. But perhaps that leap is a powerful first step to entering a virtual world. Like Peter Pan thinking a happy thought, once you make that initial leap, reality becomes plastic and you can fly."
