The Imagineers, those experts on fun at The Walt Disney Company, decided to make virtual reality work for the masses. Two years ago they made an offer to the animators who made Aladdin: you guys create a complete three-dimensional world for Aladdin, with the same hand-drawn quality as the movie, and we'll invent (no matter the cost) whatever hardware that's needed to transform your vision into a virtual world. And so they did. Using three Silicon Graphics Onyx computers stacked into one refrigerator-sized tower, a custom-fabricated headmounted video and audio helmet, a custom-designed kinetic saddle with steering stick, and a lot of proprietary software, Disney made a virtual reality world that really works.
The ride simulates a magic-carpet flight over and through the bazaars, oases, painted hallways, and underground tombs in Aladdin's world. A "guest" (Disney's term for a paying customer) sits in the rocking, carpeted saddle wearing the most comfortable headset yet made. An airplane-like control bar moves the carpet through a lush, seamless world. Guests can zoom down to the street or into rooms to interact with characters that respond to the guests' movements and decisions. (Each guest rides alone in a separate world.) The goal is to find the scarab that leads to the lamp, using clues encountered along the way.
There are no lags, no jitters, no cartoony polygons, no low-res blues - all the problems that have plagued mass-market virtual reality rides so far are gone. Instead, Disney's magic-carpet ride is as richly colorful and smooth as the film itself. It feels like being in the movie. This "realism" was achieved through brute computing power bought with brute money. Each seat - three Onyxes, electronic saddle, and headmount - costs US$1.5 million. It appears there is a minimum amount of computational power needed for a seamless virtual world, and in 1994 a couple of PCs don't cut it. But Disney's custom towers, each with the power of approximately 2,000 Pentium PCs, do.
Disney has four seats up and running for the public in its Imagineering Labs at Disney World in Orlando. Disney will add seats and enlarge the virtual world incrementally. And the price of computing power will continue to drop until every theme park has a setup.
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