FlatWorld -the Ride
This is a long-ish sort of rant- but there’s a video at the end! So hang in there, buckaroos.
So ICT’s trying to build themselves a Holodeck. Which is rad.
We took a little jaunt over to their facility last week to see their setup, which is currently configured to be a simulated Iraq. They’ve got themselves configurable digital flats, stereoscopic projectors, and a couple other neat interactive toys, the coolest of which being a 3D character they project on a semi-transparent silk who looks pretty real and can even respond to voice commands.
We lovable first-years have been asked to take a shot at designing some new applications for the FlatWorld architecture.
Here’s mine:
I was almost immediately jazzed during the tour thinking about how awesome something like this would be in a museum experience. When I was a kid growing up in New Mexico, we had a totally awesome Natural History Museum.
Actually, we still have said museum and it’s apparently still pretty awesome. What really made the experience for me as a kid was the museum’s great installation design. The exhibit about volcanoes, for example, makes you walk through a simulated volcano to see the exhibit. And of course, the highlight of my trips, the Evolater – which was the gateway to an exhibit about how NM was beachfront property in the Jurassic. So you get in a giant elevator/time machine that’s piloted by a smart-aleck computer and a lovable museum guide as we descend in time to the point where NM is under water.
I remember every little fact from that ride/exhibit gateway. And I loved it as a kid. I rode it recently and it’s getting a little dated, which is sad because it cost so much money to put these things on that the Evolater is almost one-of-a-kind and certainly hard to keep current. Also, it’s still, much as I love it, just a ride, and not as interactive as it now could be.
Enter Flatworld.
So we build an interactive FlatWorld room with a series of digital flats at the front, 10.2 surround, rumble floor, and other theatrical effects, and create a “travel pod” like the Evolater that’s capable of delivering an immersive experience that feels like you’re really zooming through- well, whatever.
What can this be used for?
A picture of an erupting volcano in a science book does not do the thing justice, but it’s ludicrous to take the kids on a field trip to Mount St. Helens. And now imagine that it’s not just a ride that goes to volcanoes or the Spinx, but it’s actually a user-driven experience. People inside the gadget direct where it travels, and what topics or sights they want to explore.
And aided by a digital agent, you can even learn research skills, or at the very least have an anthropomorphic computer in the room you can ask questions about what you’re seeing and learn more.
Well, take this is an example. Suppose you visitors for a museum enter an atrium, being told that you’re going to assist a globe-trotting detective agency. And you’ll be issued your own state-of-the-art globetrotting vehicle, which we call a GEOTRACKER to get around in.
Your experience might go like this: (it's a little movie)
Yeah, it’s Carmen Sandiego. But it improves on all of that software’s shortcomings as both an entertainment experience and a learning experience. Despite the demo you just saw that’s more of a direct homage because I’m kind of sweet on the lady in the red hat, I see the actual experience being a lot more connected than the old games, so that the experiences are linked in a useful and educational way. You’re chasing Carmen around Europe, but each of the stops are historically linked and those links are explained so that at the end you’ve been on the ride but also learned, say, all the historical concepts behind the beginning of World War I.
Plus, it’s training users to use the new research toolset, namely online encyclopedias and search engines instead of encyclopedias and almanacs.
Etc. Thoughts welcome.