| Flogiston 1.0 | ||
 |
Location: SIGGRAPH '94 - Orlando, Florida | |
| Venue: One-person Virtual Reality | ||
| Motion Base: Flogiston chair mounted on DDL electric 3-DOF | ||
| Programming Software: CEE | ||
| Film Production: Steve Speer and the Lower Colorado River Authority | ||
| A proof of concept demonstration. The wait in line sometimes reached two hours... I guess the concept worked. | ||
While I was still in Japan for Seafari I got a call from a fellow named Brian Park in Austin, Texas. (I was a bit confused by his accent, which wasn't very Texan, until I discovered he was from Scotland and had moved to Texas to work for NASA. Why we let foreign radicals work in our space program is a question I'd like to have answered - but I digress.)
Brian wanted to talk about a simulator project he had in mind for SIGGRAPH, the annual computer graphics convention. I'd been to SIGGRAPH once before (see real-time character animation) so I knew it was a big deal.
And so two days after returning from Japan I was standing in Brian's oven-like Austin garage and staring at a contraption that I was sure would never work.
Brian had this idea, see, about cyberspace and VR and new forms of human interaction and whatnot - drop by his home page and let him explain it to you - and he'd managed to cobble together this... thing.
It was a newfangled DDL electric/pneumatic motion base (the second ever built - see Trivia) with Brian's patented Flogiston relaxation chair bolted to the top. The idea was that a person would sit in the chair, put on a stereoscopic headmount display, and watch a psychedelic movie intercut with video shot from a low-flying helicopter while listening to some music. The base would be playing back a prerecorded motion program, and at the same time would respond to the beat of the music.
Brian thought this would be fun. I thought Brian had spent too much time in the Texas heat.
We had much bigger problems than conceptual, however. The DDL base had no programming system, which is why my business partner Tim Cann and I were there. We spent several days pondering the few wiring diagrams supplied with the base, attempting to hook our MIMIC motion controller into the thing. At one point we caused some rather impressive fireworks to emanate from the DDL controller box. Our first impulse was to make a dash for the airport. However, we managed to fix the fused circuitry and continue.
Finally all the parts were assembled. I climbed into the chair and put on the headmount display. We rolled the videotape. The music played. The base bounced to the beat.
I giggled uncontrollably.
Tim did, too.
So did Brian.
So did Phillip Denne, inventor of the base, when he came to visit.
Brian was on to something after all.
A week later we were all in Orlando, one of many exhibits in The Edge (the area of the convention where SIGGRAPH put the weird stuff). People started to line up.
They never stopped. For four days we were part salesmen, part carny ride operators, as we cycled as many people through the experience as we could. Every so often more sparks came out of our cobbled-together system and we had to stop the demonstration to do emergency repairs. But as Brian put it, that's why it was good to be on The Edge - nobody really expects anything to work there.
And okay, I admit it, I was wrong about the psychedelic film and the helicopter footage and the musical bouncing base. It was fun, and was also a tantalizing glimpse of future possibilities. Brian's working now on the next generation Flogiston project. You have been warned.
... on The Edge at SIGGRAPH '94(From left - Phillip Denne and David Vatcher of DDL, giggling Flogistoneer, Trey Stokes)
Trivia: Brian's Flogiston chair was seen in the film The Lawnmower Man. Another may be glimpsed in the Sean Connery / Nicholas Cage film The Rock. And if you can get into the "VIP suite" at the Innoventions Pavilion at Disney's EPCOT Center, you can relax in a Flogiston chair yourself!
DDL
stands for Denne Development, Ltd. - whose founder Phillip Denne
developed the hydraulic-powered Venturer simulator some twenty years
ago. (Six of the attractions listed here use Venturers or customized
Venturer platforms.) While ownership of the Venturer design has changed
hands many times, over two hundred have been manufactured to date and
most are still operating - the Chevy Novas of the simulator world.
(Thomson Entertainment is the current distributor of the Venturer.)
Mr. Denne's new brainchild is the DDL electro-pneumatic base. The first production model DDL base ever built became part of a weightlessness simulation experiment at NASA (courtesy of Brian Park whose Flogiston chair is attached - somewhere in Texas an astronaut is giggling).
Related Websites: