VR Amusement Park (CTP2)

VR Amusement Park
Requires	Natural Interface
Production cost	3500
Upkeep	10
Effects
+5 Happiness

VR Amusement Park is a building in Call to Power II.

Gameplay

Virtual Reality (VR) Amusement Parks offer citizens an ultra-realistic form of entertainment. Using the latest technology, it allows them to immerse themselves in a totally realistic environment, enabling them to travel without leaving home, play games and sports with no harm or regard for physical skill or impairment. Fantasies come to life, dreams are fulfilled and this makes people extremely happy.

Great Library entry

The two main forms of twentieth century entertainment were film and television. Their impact on human society continued to be analyzed and quantified long after their novelty wore off. In the 1980s, however, media experts began to speculate on the death of TV and movies at the hands of an emerging technological medium with far-reaching entertainment potential, called "virtual reality." This technology faded from public consciousness in lieu of any compelling applications, however, and TV and movies continued to claim the majority share of the public's entertainment quotient. Amusement parks began to incorporate more technology in their attractions, combining the power of moving traditional animatronics and detailed environments with moving pictures, compelling sound, pyrotechnics and dynamic lighting. However, these attractions could only produce so much verisimilitude. The limited interactivity of traditional attraction technology mitigated their depth of immersion. Thrill rides could only follow one path, live action sequences were often scripted and safety considerations limited the possible actions guests could take within environments.

The explosion in computer hardware technology in the late 1990s and early 2000s refocused attention of creating a virtual reality environment, in which patrons could exist and interact in a realistic physical space. However, developments in neural interfaces shifted the focus of virtual reality and immersion entertainment from highly detailed physical environments to ultra-realistic "mental" environments. The first neural interface VR machines employed high-resolution liquid crystal display eyepieces, standard headphones and an array of electrodes on the subject's scalp. The eyepieces broadcast images, synchronized with sounds, and the electrodes monitored brain activity to trigger environmental elements and "read" the subject's impulses, translating them into actions within the environment. As neural interfaces evolved, virtual reality devices simply tapped into the nervous system itself. Instead of displaying images to the ocular receptors of the eye, they piped data, translated into neurochemical impulses into the part of the brain that interpreted visual data. The same theory applied to aural stimuli as well. To complete the circle of interactivity, the neural interface monitored sectors of the brain, including emotions, motor skills and thought processes, to gauge the user's actions within the synthesized environment.

The first Virtual Reality "Amusement Park" opened in Berlin in 2027. Guests donned neural interfaces and sat comfortably in anechoic chambers, transporting their consciousness to another reality. VR Amusement Parks began to supplant more traditional entertainment media, leading motion picture and television studios to switch to producing VR Sims instead of traditional films. Citizens, once delighted and mesmerized by movie screens soon found the superior experience in being a part of the movie itself. The worlds of cinema, theme parks and computer games had intersected, revolutionizing entertainment forever.