Showscan's newest motion simulator ride opens in the basement at the Trocadero Centre, Piccadilly, in October. Right next door to "Alien War", where live actors, giant puppets and a smoke machine are doing their best to frighten you witless, the Emaginator foyer is filled with cool blue pulsing lights and shiny steel Expomet. It's a little 1990's and a little 1960's, the ubiquitous Pepsi machine, popcorn and M&M's over in the corner with the T-shirts, the key fobs, and a sign that warns off pregnant women and anyone with a heart condition, epilepsy or back problems. Staff wear T-shirts emblazoned with the big "E". I hesitate to ask if they mean Emaginator or Ecstacy. There are three rides already up and running, costing £3 each: "Space Race", "Desert Duel" and "Devil's Mine Ride". Our small party are lining up to see a preview of the new ride that will showcase the grand opening, "Cosmic Pinball". We are to be the pinballs. Ushered into the darkened "Red Room" pre-show area, TV screens show a short video introduction featuring a sinister, shape-shifting Controller: "All your senses will be under my command...heh... heh... heh..." The sequence shows off some spectacular fluid animation techniques, reminiscent of "The Lawnmower Man"; the build-up of repeated warnings is unnerving enough to provoke laughter, nervous or disbelieving.
Amongst the riders today are Peter Stothart and his sons. Peter is managing director of Wavefront UK, the company behind the 3D animation software that makes "Cosmic Pinball" possible. Trim and casual, he explains while we wait that the four minute computer animation took eight months of work on the graphics alone. Graphics and animation counts for about 70% of the development effort, co-ordinated with surround sound, ride hydraulics and synchronisation software. That's nearly a year's development time for a crew of forty or more, for our four minutes. Is it worth it?
Theme park ride simulators are not new. Disneyland's "Star Rides" tour has been showcasing motion simulation since the late 1980s. There are Showscan sites in Las Vegas, Hong Kong, Osaka, Toronto, and the Imperial War Museum, Duxford. There is one planned for China next year. The Holy Grail is a system that can deliver the gut-wrenching thrill of a modern roller-coaster without the mechanical risks that go along with them.
Inside the cinema are six four-person pods, like dodgem cars, and a screen. We climb in, buckle up and the houselights dim as the pods rise into hydraulic motion space.
"Welcome to Cosmic Pinball. This is a game of elimination..."
The soundtrack is setting the story, but it is speed we want. Vintage style-car spaceships are the balls in a giant pinball space station race, and just like pinballs, we are hurled from bumpers and flippers and slingshot kickers, other cars crashing and burning around us and four minutes are gone. The sensation of "being there" is extraordinary, the matching of photo-realistic visuals, surround sound and motion cues is perfect. A roller coaster that goes nowhere and has no rails has just surpassed anything a real world ride could do. I'm ready to do it again.
There are 2 cinemas at the Emaginator, open 12 hours a day. Each cinema seats 24 at time, and rides last 10 minutes from preshow to staggering out into the foyer with wobbly legs. The target throughput is 2000 customers a day. If they can keep it up, the £2.5 million start-up cost should be recouped in 18 months. Robin's Cinemas manage the Emaginator for Showscan and they are probably onto a good thing. Nickie Baylis, General Manager says: "I thought it would be one-off tourist trade only but we haven't officially opened yet and we already need new rides. People walk out and go right back and buy another ticket, even if the queue is half-an-hour long." The rides targeted the teenage market, but Nickie Baylis says the actual age span is more like 6 to 60. Seventeen different rides will soon be available, with more to follow allowing for the lengthy development times.
The Showscan system was originally designed by film special effects genius Douglas Trumbull. The film runs at 60 frames per second (fps), well over twice as fast as motion pictures at 25 fps, even though cinema projectors double up each frame to fool the eye into seeing 48 fps. Fast motion film still strobes slightly at 25 fps, and becomes fluid above 50 fps, so Showscan allows seamless animation. Showscan is filmed on special 65 mm stock at a camera speed of 125th second and replayed at 60 fps as either a transfer to 70 mm film or equivalent high definition video from laser disk, scanning 1250 lines (S-VHS is 500 lines). Laser disk can provide better static image quality than film stock, although its biggest advantage is the eradication of problems like scratching or degradation. Each Emaginator cinema has 2 NEC Multisync 9PG video projectors running simultaneously to provide additional brightness and definition. (Doubling also provides backup.) The field of view is about 60° to 75° not wide enough to include peripheral vision, but wide enough to benefit from the film designers cutting down the detail and increasing the motion at the edges of the frame. Human peripheral vision is motion-sensitive, presumably part of the body's defences smart predators don't attack head-on. But however sharp the image, Showscan is not "true" 3D. No glasses, no resolved colour or polarisation. High-speed 3D imposes a resolving overload on the brain and only works for a relatively shallow depth of field, so it is better and cheaper to provide depth-cueing through visual cues like shadow and texture. With live-action footage, this requires careful composition, filming and editing. With computer animation, film-makers are dependant on their software to achieve good results.
Wavefront was founded ten years ago in the USA by another special effects wizard, Bill Kovacs. They recently merged with Thomson Digital Image and provide an unbeatable workbench of animation tools. Talent Factory, the Brussels-based film production company who created "Devil's Mine Ride" and "Cosmic Pinball" used two Silicon Graphics Indigo II Extremes to animate and one Silicon Graphics Challenge to render. Back in 1982, both Kovacs and Douglas Trumbull worked on the ground-breaking Disney computer-animated feature "Tron". "Tron" was built with a DEC VAX running at 0.5 MIPS (million instructions per second). The Challenge runs at 500 MIPS. Talent Factory relied on three Wavefront design products; "Explore" for 3D design and rendering, "Dynamation" for animation and "Composer" for compositing. The task was vast. The world of "Cosmic Pinball" combines over 40,000 separate rendered objects, 3000 x 4000 pixel resolution and 14,520 separate animation frames. At full speed and with 128 MB of RAM, the Silicon Graphics machines could average one frame per hour.
Showscan's promotional literature for "Cosmic Pinball" credits Ray Spencer as director, Jos Claesen and Anton Roebben for computer animation. Talent Factory credits them all as directors. This illustrates an Atlantic divide in thinking pointed out by Peter Stothart. The work exceed the demands of special effects footage in most Hollywood features, but is still equated with special effects. Theme rides like "Cosmic Pinball" require a certain freedom in design that Stothart feels is typically European, where traditional US film industry hierarchies haven't taken hold and directors work more closely and freely with their design teams. A similar team spirit can be found in European software games houses, where Wavefront software on Silicon Graphics machines is becoming increasingly popular; Core Design, US Gold, Sega Europe, Argonaut and Gremlin Graphics have all bought Gameware authoring software for building the new 24-bit graphic games we will be buying in 1995.
The all-new motion platform for the Emaginator is the HD Quadra 6 four-seater pod and base, built by McFadden Systems in Santa Fe, California. The Quadra supplies six degrees of movement, adding side-to-side and yaw to the pitch, roll, heave and surge of previous Showscan site motion platforms from Hughes Rediffusion Simulation and Intamin AG. McFadden, who supply flight, railway simulators and driving simulators, were apparently keen to break into the increasingly lucrative leisure market. The Quadra hydraulics are very impressive, providing well over 6" movement in any direction, and pitch/roll/yaw of around 20°. Even if the maximum speed is only just over a mile an hour, translational acceleration can get close to 1G. Stops are software-controlled hydro-electronics, with physical safety stops built in.
The pods can be programmed to handle four different ride settings, from Number 4 Armchair mode, through more detailed but smoother rides, to Number 1 Shake'em-up Screaming Turbo Nutter mode; modes can be altered quickly to suit different audiences. Despite the legal warnings, none of the ride settings are remotely dangerous and comply with all the various Health and Safety regulations, though the two I sampled were on a lowly Number 3, and were movement enough, thank you. Frontal impact simulation is deliberately reduced, but lateral movement is used very effectively. From previous (and nearly terminal) real world experience, I can confirm the impression of a vehicle sliding fast on loose sand in "Desert Duel" is particularly accurate.
Every element of the Emaginator has benefited from advances in simulator technology. The screen may be small, but it's bigger than many multiplex cinemas and the quality is superb just like full-size aircraft simulators, the screen is shaped to give a slight 3D curve by creating a vacuum between a flexible reflective film and a pre-formed backing. The ergonomics of the pod seating still need some work my atypical 220 lb. frame found some uncomfortable mouldings to be flung against, though I was assured that the interior design of the pods is still being perfected. Nick Gibson-Ross is the Technical Manager, and is rightly proud of a system that is almost fully automated and that works. His only real teething troubles have been with hydraulic hoses rather than software. His small control room is empty, apart from one large bank of rack-mounted units and a table littered with well-thumbed manuals. The rides are played from 2 Sony HDL-2000 High Definition Video Systems using specially mastered laser disks that contain the graphics and the motion timecode triggers for the Quadra hydraulics running from hard disk, also doubled for backup. The only true sound on the HDTV disk is a monitor track; there is another timecode to trigger the sound from Yamaha CDC 745 Natural Sound players. Digital graphics and sound are still new to Showscan; earlier sites still use 70 mm film and magnetic stripe stereo sound. Full-size cinemas using Digital Theatre Sound run six sound channels; front and surround left and right, centre and sub-bass. The Emaginator runs only five channels, skipping the centre screen speaker because of the solid back to the suction screen, but the cinemas are small enough for the stereo to resolve a centre placing. There are 10 x 1 kW Ashley amplifiers driving the sound to Boss speaker systems, though the sub-bass is rather lost by having the pods off the floor. (Perhaps the bass bins could be bolted to the underside of the pods shades of Sensurround?) The "Red Room" pre-show video sequences run from 3 Pioneer LDV 43000 Laserdisk players, the extra player allowing for changeovers. In fact, the only time any of this equipment needs human intervention is to change a ride disk the shows are run remotely from the cinemas.
Whatever the hype-merchants say, this is not Virtual Reality. More like "VR meets the Movies". It has the direct matching of our senses to re-created stimulation, but little else; no real-time graphics, no full immersion, no direct manipulation. Showscan themselves prefer not to market their rides as VR, but the Emaginator certainly qualifies as a new and amplified multimedia experience. The quality of the pre-rendered animation is far superior to current real-time rendering in hardware. The high definition, high frame rate graphics largely overcome the current disappointing limitations of head-mounted display optics; in most VR headsets, you are still legally blind. I'm not sure how a full-length action movie in Showscan would measure up. The effects might tire with overuse, but I doubt it. In the hands of a skilled director like Spielberg or Cameron, who knows what we might see? As this technology drops in cost, expect to see Emaginators materialising in larger Multiplex cinemas, possibly first for short white-knuckle rides, then perhaps for high-cost "Showscan" versions of the biggest feature films. Showscan technology is expensive and time-consuming, but not all of a movie is moving, after all. Would I pay West End theatre prices to see "True Lies" or "The Lion King" in Showscan plus motion platform? Absolutely. And would I recommend the Emaginator now? For once, once is honestly never enough.
The Emaginator can be found in the basement of the Trocadero Centre,
Piccadilly, London.
Tickets £3 per ride.
Ivor Benjamin is a systems analyst and a theatre director. He is conducting research into interactive virtual reality systems at the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction, City University, London. You can contact him by e-mail at ivorb@cix.compulink.co.uk ivorb@cix.co.uk or i.d.benjamin@city.ac.uk
Back to PUBLICATIONS
HOMEPAGE