Douglas Trumball's big budget VR debuts (where else?) in Las Vegas.
The three-theater "Secrets of the Luxor Pyramid" is the biggest thing Douglas Trumbull has done since he revolutionized the special effects business in 1968 with 2001: A Space Odyssey. As the wizard credited for special effects in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner, and the Back to the Future attraction at Universal Studios, Trumbull is one of the few artists capable of creating virtual-reality based attractions that can compete with theme parks or major motion pictures. The Las Vegas-based Luxor project represents the first time a client (in this case, Circus Circus Enterprises) has given him enough money to actually design such an attraction - an immersive experience that can transport an audience of 350 to another reality.
The marriage of VR and Vegas was inevitable: To make a truly effective immersive entertainment experience with today's VR technology, you need to support a top-notch team like Trumbull's with a casino-scale budget and a mandate to think big. That's what Circus Circus did with Luxor, a 30-story glass pyramid built around Trumbull's entertainment complex. Like the Mirage down the block - the casino with the volcano in front and the rainforest inside - the $375 million Luxor, which opened in mid-October, is one of the first examples of a whole new industry. By building "destination resorts" with fantasy experiences at the center, the casinos are appropriating the high-end illusion business from the moviemakers and theme parks.
As Trumbull said at a small invitational VR conference last spring: "If you create the right kind of experience, people will wait in line for an hour, and pay $10 for a fifteen-minute experience."
"The right kind of experience" has been an old challenge to Trumbull. His long-standing desire has been to go beyond the photo-realistic grail of today's computer artists and create perceptions that are even more fine- grained than reality. If reality is 50 million polygons per second, as computer graphics wiz Alvy Ray Smith has been quoted as estimating, Trumbull wants 500 million.
Trumbull regards Luxor as "an experiment in finally going over the edge of a belief barrier through careful control of photography and projection, to the point where a motion picture can be seen to be a real live event."
Trumbull is consciously experimenting at the edge of the envelope of human ability to assimilate media. "[Circus Circus] was the first client who has fully supported my desire to push the state of the art....We have 40 SGI workstations from Indigos to Crimsons and three IBM PVS systems working around the clock doing rendering and digital compositing. Major number- crunching."
Technologies evolve in the strangest ways. Computers were created to calculate ballistics equations, and now we use them to create amusing illusions. Creating amusing illusions is a big business if you play it right. What better place than Las Vegas to build a state-of-the-art palace of illusions?
