Borg Return
The Las Vegas Hilton has a new Star Trek ride. Sounds fun. $30.
Wired News: Vegas Steels for Borg InvasionIn Borg Invasion 4D, a Star Trek: Voyager-themed adventure ride opening March 18 at the Las Vegas Hilton, part of Star Trek: The Experience, the room itself never actually moves. And yet, thanks to both a new approach to filming 3-D footage -- used in the ride's film, the world's first 3-D movie both shot and projected entirely digitally -- and theater chairs loaded with gizmos that poke, prod and contort in innovative ways, viewers are 'about to have the most immersive, the most intense simulated experience available anywhere."
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Watching the new 3-D movie will be easier and less disconcerting as well, Thornton said, thanks to the use of a Christie CP 2000H projector, a $500,000 machine that eliminates some of the shaky, flickering qualities that plague other 35-mm projectors. Current 3-D projection often leaves viewers dizzy or tired because the mechanical projector shakes the film and prevents the two images from laying on one another properly at all times, a problem eliminated in the digital world where the images are not physical bits of film but data files that can be placed with greater exactitude.
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The theater's 48 gray-cloth armchairs are similarly complex devices. Each, at a cost of $25,000, has new means of making the viewer feel simulated perceptions, including air bladders that fill up and release against various parts of the back to give the sensation of speeding up or slowing down. It's technology the U.S. military uses now for its simulated training exercises, Thornton said. The seats also have ways of shaking and poking the people sitting in them, and have individual surround-sound speakers.
Official Site
* Ray, 3/12/2004 02:13:44 PM
