Time Machine of Dreams aka "Into the Fourth Dimension"
	Location: SanRio Puroland - Tokyo (REPLACED BY NEW RIDEFILM IN 1994)
	Venue: Theatre-style venue (3-D 70mm)
	Motion Base: Mitsubishi 3-DOF row seats
	Programming Software: Triad
	Film Production: deGraf/Wahrman
	Director: Rick Harper
Professor Dream-On and Max, the Maximum Energy Computer, take you on a journey into the human imagination - where butterflies can become pterodactyls at any moment.

Next door to the Hanna-Barbera ride at Universal Studios Florida was the Ghostbusters Show, created by the Landmark Entertainment Group. (Ghostbusters is gone now - it was replaced by "Twister" in the spring of 1998.) During installation, the Landmark boys used to drop by to watch me program Hanna-Barbera. So when Landmark needed a motion programmer for the Time Machine of Dreams ride at their new Puroland theme park in Japan, they called me. (Somehow they'd gotten the idea I did this sort of thing all the time.)

Oddly enough, I'd already worked on Time Machine of Dreams. The deGraf/Wahrman company made the film, and I'd done the performance animation for "Max" the computerized navigator. (For more on how that was done, see Real-time computer characters in our Creature FX section.)

Throughout the film, Max interacts with "Professor Dream-On" - an animatronic robot located at the front of the theater. Not only did I perform Max for the film and program the simulator, I also programmed the Dream-On robot - so I played all the parts in this attraction.

All told, I spent the last three months of 1990 in Tokyo installing and programming this show. There are plenty of stories I could tell about it, but time, space, and fear of libel suits prevents me from doing so at this time. That time we had the fire...what a great story that is...

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Watch for: Max's rotating astrolabe brains - designed by our own Maija Beeton, producer of the film at deGraf/Wahrman.

Trivia: Something T.M.O.D. has which (to my knowledge) no other simulator does - Smell-o-rama! Each audience seat contains air vents which blow scents in the riders' faces at appropriate points in the show.

Motion, smell, 3-D, surround sound...the only thing TMOD lacks is taste. (Is that a pun? No comment.)

Four years later, Time Machine of Dreams was retired - and I returned to Puroland for Monster Planet of Godzilla.

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Videos: Most of Time Machine of Dreams, intercut with clips from The Lawnmower Man, can be seen in the video Beyond the Mind's Eye.
Max (now dubbed into English, so excuse the terrible lip-sync) is the first image you see - he also appears on the cover art.

The complete video of Into the Fourth Dimension appears on the SIGGRAPH Video Review #72 tape, available by mail order.