Certainly a radical rethink is necessary. Some engineers, including Willem Bles, a consultant for Vekoma, a Dutch company that designs fairground rides, say they're frightened by what's allowed. For Bles, the problem with rides is apparent every time he visits a park. "Look at people's faces," he says, "they're not having fun." He believes that true innovation has been lacking for a while—that the new rides simply increase the horrors that people have to endure. "The rides are more about survival," he says.
...
Roller coasters now include ever more loops, corkscrews and inversions. You can ride sitting down, standing up or upside down, you can copy aerobatic pilots' manoeuvres—but there's still only so many ways you can turn a car when it's on a track. Take the car off the track, however, and you can create a whole new set of sensations. (X roller coaster is one of "4d rides" examples which as well as playing with the three directions of linear motion—up and down, left to right, and front to back—they can now send you spinning head over heels.)
...
The next step in designing rides, however, could throw predictability out the window.
It's based on the first law of having fun: lose control. And when spinning is involved, losing control is easy. This step has already been taken in the newest waltzers—tea cup rides—and it could easily be applied to the next generation of roller coasters.
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The latest waltzer cars now spin freely, driven only by the passengers' weight and the centrifugal forces created by the car's spin. It's all governed by chaos theory: perhaps not the most comforting thought when climbing aboard a ride. But they are very popular attractions. "People seem to like these chaotic rides," Stengel says.
Chaos means that the position and weight of everyone on the ride can influence just how good—or bad—your experience is. So you'll never have exactly the same ride twice. In fact, it is so sensitive that even the state of its bearings can influence the ride.
...
Stengel feels that flinging people around in ever more chaotic machines is no longer the way forward. Bles agrees enthusiastically—and has a radical solution in mind. In amusement parks of the future, he'll be thrilling you gently.
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The pilots' enjoyment of the spinning machines seems to come from surprises. "It's often connected to the unexpected," Bles says. Tilt the head while spinning with the eyes closed, for example, and suddenly, an intense tumbling sensation called the Coriolis illusion comes into play. "People find it fascinating," says Bles, "a very nice and unexpected sensation of movement.
...
Stengel believes the sequence of accelerations, not their size, is what makes a good ride. "Changing a small acceleration is more interesting than always being on the limit that a passenger can take," he says. A roll that includes a change of acceleration from small negative
Newscientist From issue 2288 of New Scientist magazine, 28 April 2001, page 32
A prenatal reaction to rock or sway is undoubtedly related to when a fetus is being carried in the womb and is subject to a gentle rocking motion that the mother is unaware of. Subconsciously, in times of high anxiety, it is possible for one to revert back to or rather mimic the sensation of being carried in the womb. Rocking is therefore a universal soothing technique that spans across every culture. From being rocked as a baby and child, humans seem to never loose their sensitivity to rocking motion. Whether by the gentle lapping of waves on a boat, a swing in a playground, or hammock in the garden most people would be able to find relaxation and comfort.
The motion of rocking makes blood pressure fall and respiration slow. the physical act taps into a pleasure centre located in the brain that produces endorphins and thus creating a therapeutic affect. It is a self comforting system in which smooth, rhythmic changes in linear motion act as a natural stimulant to the central nervous system.
Interestingly rocking also helps stimulate our ability of balance, by activating the system within our inner ear. This also goes some way to help us be alert and attentive.
Spiritual Rocking
Most of the time we think of prayer as a static activity. Some orthodox jews use a rocking motion called ‘shukkeling’ when praying on the ha'shem. There are mixed explanations of this tradition; some believe that at the beginning of the production of scriptures there were few books for everyone to read so the rocking motion reflects an old custom of taking it in turns to look at the pages. Others might say that the motion of shukkeling is a way of enhancing concentration or that the words are igniting the soul like the lighting of a wick and so the body moves like a flame.
In some cases rocking is a proportional physical and spiritual response to prayer. Just as we might nod our head or tap our feet in time with a piece of music, some find that the saying of prayers stimulates a physical rocking motion.
The spiritual society of the ‘shakers’ has the most impressive rocking tradition. Rockers are part of all life stages - a craddle for the new born; a rocking horse toy; a rocking stool for work in the
household of the community; a rocking chair for leisure time, social meeting and reading of spiritual texts;an adult-size craddle for ill, weak or aged invalids. The gentle rocking movement helps to calm their spirit and prevent from bedsores. The rocking motion closes the circle of life,
from birth to death!
Above: The mouse with a human ear growing on its back proved just how far science could, or would, go. The experiment saw a biodegradable, synthetic frame planted on the mouse; human cells were added to the frame and nourished by the mouse to produce, in effect, a real ear. With an ear-to-body ratio of about eighty percent, he's probably a very good listener.
If you put 45 different animals in the same cage, you might expect the larger critters to attack the smaller ones.
In that sense at least, the inhabitants of a new zoo in Vila Franca de Xira, Portugal, are no exception. However, the Robotarium X is the first zoo dedicated to artificial life. Inside, legged, wheeled and slithering autonomous robots crawl around a 4-metre-high cage made of steel and glass.
Nine larger robots interact with visitors by following their movements, making defensive actions or opening their "petals" in response to crowds. The more aggressive robots cut the tails off their smaller cousins (watch a video of Robotarium X). "We must start looking at robots as a novel species that is being born to share with us the planet and human society," says artist Leonel Moura, who designed the zoo.
On May 21, 2005 Six Flags Great Adventure introduced Kingda Ka, the tallest, fastest roller coaster on the planet to the public. This $25-million Swiss designed "rocket coaster" uses hydraulic motors to launch the trains along a horizontal section of track from zero to 128 mph in an impressive 3.5 seconds. The trains then begins a vertical ascent up a steel tower that peaks at 456 feet or 45 stories. Crossing over the apex the train enters a vertical descent plunging through a 270-degree spiral twist again reaching speeds in excess of 100 mph. One final surprise comes before the brake run, a 129-foot tall camelback hill, that offers plenty of negative G's also known fondly as "airtime".
Our Exorcist Bed thrashes on a solid steel 360° simulator chassis. Your Actors can ride it or you may choose to add the Levitator option which safely and comfortably floats an Actor to a height of 5’0” up and down over the bed as it thrashes around.
The study participant sits in a chair wearing a pair of head-mounted video displays. These have two small screens over each eye, which show a live film recorded by two video cameras placed beside each other two metres behind the participant’s head. The image from the left video camera is presented on the left-eye display and the image from the right camera on the right-eye display. The participant sees these as one ‘stereoscopic’ (3D) image, so they see their own back displayed from the perspective of someone sitting behind them. The researcher then stands just beside the participant (in their view) and uses two plastic rods to simultaneously touch the participant’s actual chest out-of-view and the chest of the illusory body, moving this second rod towards where the illusory chest would be located, just below the camera’s view. The participants confirmed that they had experienced sitting behind their physical body and looking at it from that location.[2]
- ^ Ehrsson, H.H. 2007. The Experimental Induction of Out-of-Body Experiences. Science 317:1048 DOI: 10.1126/science.1142175
- ^ First out-of-body experience induced in laboratory setting, August 23 2007, EurekAlert!
This installation in the Ars Electronica Center has been a smash hit with visitors ever since the opening of the museum, which has replaced almost all of the “exhibits” on display there at least once over the past eight years. And, indeed, Humphrey will remain aloft in Ars Electronica’s airspace, but his new design will greatly enhance and intensify the experience of flight. Continual improvements in processing capabilities make it possible to generate simulations that get closer and closer to perfection. Virtual reality systems use stereoscopic imagery to produce the illusion of a real, three-dimensional environment. By means of force feedback devices, even physical forces can be mechanically simulated in these virtual worlds.
In the early 80s, when the metallurgical industry in the Lorraine region entered its final crisis, the public powers had the idea to make up for this collapse by creating a European leisure zone, an "intelligent" theme park which could jumpstart the economy of the region. This park was called Smurfland. The managing director of the dead metallurgy naturally became the manager of the theme park, and the unemployed workers were rehired as "smurfmen" in the context of this new Smurfland. Unfortunately, the park itself, for several reasons, had to be closed, and the former factory workers turned "smurfmen" once again found themselves on the dole. It is a somber destiny which, after making them the real victims of the job market, transformed them into the ghostly workers of leisure time, and finally turned them into the unemployed of both.
But Smurfland was only a miniature universe. The Disney enterprise is much bigger. To illustrate, it should be known that Disney "Unlimited," having taken over one of the major US television networks, is about to purchase 42nd Street in New York, the "hot" section of 42nd Street, to transform it into an erotic theme park, with the intention of changing hardly anything of the street itself. The idea would be simply to transform, in situ, one of the high centers of pornography into a branch of Disney World. Transforming the pornographers and the prostitutes, like the factory workers in Smurfland, into extras [figurants] in their own world, metamorphosed into identical figures, museumified, disneyfied. By the way, do you know how General Schwarzkopf, the great Gulf War strategist, celebrated his victory? He had a huge party at Disney World. These festivities in the palace of the imaginary were a worthy conclusion to such a virtual war.
But the Disney enterprise goes beyond the imaginary. Disney, the precursor, the grand initiator of the imaginary as virtual reality, is now in the process of capturing all the real world to integrate it into its synthetic universe, in the form of a vast "reality show" where reality itself becomes a spectacle [vient se donner en spectacle], where the real becomes a theme park. The transfusion of the real is like a blood transfusion, except that here it is a transfusion of real blood into the exsanguine universe of virtuality. After the prostitution of the imaginary, here is now the hallucination of the real in its ideal and simplified version.
At Disney World in Orlando, they are even building an identical replica of the Los Angeles Disneyland, as a sort of historical attraction to the second degree, a simulacrum to the second power. It is the same thing that CNN did with the Gulf War: a prototypical event which did not take place, because it took place in real time, in CNN's instantaneous mode. Today, Disney could easily revisit the Gulf War as a worldwide show. The Red Army choirs have already celebrated Christmas at Euro Disney. Everything is possible, and everything is recyclable in the polymorphous universe of virtuality. Everything can be bought over. There is no reason why Disney would not take over the human genome, which, by the way, is already being resequenced, to turn it into a genetic show. In the end [au fond], they would cryogenize the entire planet, just like Walt Disney himself who decided to be cryogenized in a nitrogen solution, waiting for some kind of resurrection in the real world. But there is no real world anymore, not even for Walt Disney. If one day he wakes up, he'll no doubt have the biggest surprise of his life. Meanwhile, from the bottom of his nitrogen solution he continues to colonize the world - both the imaginary and the real - in the spectral universe of virtual reality, inside which we all have become extras [figurants]. The difference is that when we put on our digital suits, plug in our sensorial captors, or press the keys of our virtual reality arcade, we enter live spectrality whereas Disney, the genial anticipator, has entered the virtual reality of death.
The New World Order is in a Disney mode. But Disney is not alone in this mode of cannibalistic attraction. We saw Benetton with his commercial campaigns, trying to recuperate the human drama of the news (AIDS, Bosnia, poverty, apartheid) by transfusing reality into a New Mediatic Figuration (a place where suffering and commiseration end in a mode of interactive resonance). The virtual takes over the real as it appears, and then replicates it without any modification [le recrache tel quel], in a pret-a-porter (ready-to-wear) fashion.
If this operation can be so successful in creating a universal fascination with only a tint of moral disapproval, it is because reality itself, the world itself, with its frenzy of cloning has already been transformed into an interactive performance, some kind of Lunapark for ideologies, technologies, works, knowledge, death, and even destruction. All this is likely to be cloned and resurrected in a juvenile museum of Imagination or a virtual museum of Information.
Similarly, it is useless to keep searching for computer viruses since we are all caught in a viral chain of networks anyway. Information itself has become viral; perhaps not sexually transmissible yet, but much more powerful through its numerical propagation.
And so it does not take much work for Disney to scoop up reality, such as it is. "Spectacular Inc.," as Guy Debord would say. But we are no longer in a society of spectacle, which itself has become a spectacular concept. It is no longer the contagion of spectacle that alters reality, but rather the contagion of virtuality that erases the spectacle. Disneyland still belonged to the order of the spectacle and of folklore, with its effects of entertainment [distraction] and distanciation [distance]. Disney World and its tentacular extension is a generalized metastasis, a cloning of the world and of our mental universe, not in the imaginary but in a viral and virtual mode. We are no longer alienated and passive spectators but interactive extras [figurants interactifs]; we are the meek lyophilized members of this huge "reality show." It is no longer a spectacular logic of alienation but a spectral logic of disincarnation; no longer a fantastic logic of diversion, but a corpuscular logic of transfusion and transubstantiation of all our cells; an enterprise of radical deterrence of the world from the inside and no longer from outside, similar to the quasi-nostalgic universe of capitalistic reality today. Being an extra [figurant] in virtual reality is no longer being an actor or a spectator. It is to be out of the scene [hors-scene], to be obscene.
Disney wins at yet another level. It is not only interested in erasing the real by turning it into a three-dimensional virtual image with no depth, but it also seeks to erase time by synchronizing all the periods, all the cultures, in a single traveling motion, by juxtaposing them in a single scenario. Thus, it marks the beginning of real, punctual and unidimensional time, which is also without depth. No present, no past, no future, but an immediate synchronism of all the places and all the periods in a single atemporal virtuality. Lapse or collapse of time: that's properly speaking what the fourth dimension [la quatrieme dimension] is about. It is the dimension of the virtual, of real time; a dimension which, far from adding to the others, erases them all. And so it has been said that, in a century or in a millennium, gladiator movies will be watched as if they were authentic Roman movies, dating back to the era of the Roman empire, as real documentaries on Ancient Rome; that in the John Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, a pastiche of a Pompeian villa, will be confused, in an anachronistic manner, with a villa of the third century B.C. (including the pieces inside from Rembrandt, Fra Angelico, everything confused in a single crush of time); that the celebration of the French Revolution in Los Angeles in 1989 will retrospectively be confused with the real revolutionary event. Disney realizes de facto such an atemporal utopia by producing all the events, past or future, on simultaneous screens, and by inexorably mixing all the sequences as they would or will appear to a different civilization than ours. But it is already ours. It is more and more difficult for us to imagine the real, History, the depth of time, or three-dimensional space, just as before it was difficult, from our real world perspective, to imagine a virtual universe or the fourth dimension [la quatrieme dimension].
