new simulator concept in Europe.

Bobbejaanland in Belgium is opening in 2006 Desperados, the world's first interactive simulator!

The concept is that 60 riders will be on moving horse saddles that will move with the movie. Then, each rider will have a gun and will shoot at riders on screen and points are counted!

Here's the website:

http://www.alterface.com/desperados/

This seems to be a combo of the duck shooting games I played with when I was young, and a dark ride. Is this really the worlds "first"? It seems to... not uncommon.

Well - of course it's not 100% "new", but it's still a new implementation -
it looks basically like a classic simulator ride but the audience is equipped with tracked interaction devices - to track 8 guns with 6 Dof in realtime nad independently is not trivial and quite some effort, and I think it is quite risky to do this in an amusement ride with such a heavy demand on stability.
On the other hand, this kind of attraction is not going to be very expensive hardware wise - my guess is it will be running on a single machine or maybe 2.
Most of the effort probably went into the development of the software and the interactive content, as well as the mechanical horses people are sitting on.
Definitely a type of ride we will hear more about in the future.
I personally find the shoot-them-up action quite despiseable though. Can't computer guys think of other ways of "fun" entertainment than to kill everybody?
jeez.

Yeah, this seemed like a mix between Duck Hunt and that horse-riding arcade game (can't think of the name off the top of my head) stuck into a simulator theater.

Actually, just take any sim theater, retrofit the chairs with horse-shaped chairs, and give us a light pistol to shoot spongebob... err, I mean plankton. ;)

Don't Police training camps have somthing like this? Cept, you stand.

I think there's been quite a few games with gunlike-objects as interaction devices to point and shoot things on screen already. The main difference seems to be the collaborative experience as all audience members have their own gun in a shared environmnet + they sit on mechanical horses.
Collaborative and shared virtual environments like this have been on research agendas of VR research groups (both military and civilian) around the world for quite some time now as well.
It seems like it's about time something went into production - the main obstacle used to be that the technological hardware was too expensive and fragile for the hardcore public traffic, but home-PCs and most of all game consoles have a graphics power today that would have cost about 100-500x as much just 5 years ago - if it was even available then.

But as long as they can't give me the butterflies in my stomach, the wind and the airtime and the feelings of weightlessness, I would never trade in the real thing for a virtual ride. *** Edited 11/26/2005 1:05:50 PM UTC by superman***