Military networking technology applied to location-based, theme park and home entertainment systems

Abstract

Theme parks and location-based entertainment (LBE) systems are evolving away from scripted scenario, movie-based motion rides, and towards computer image-generated, interactive experiences. Though the passive ride attractions will not be displaced entirely, a new breed of smaller, distributed, multi-player pods, running networked, real-time simulations of virtual worlds, will attract customers desiring more interactivity. Some of these systems are presently in use, such as BattleTech™, Virtuality™, Fightertown™, etc.These systems are weak in several areas, including large-scale networking. Typically, these systems can network up to four nodes on a local area network (LAN). The next generation of these systems will likely use cutting edge networking technology developed by the military, specifically distributed interactive simulation (DIS) technology. DIS allows thousands of participants to be networked via LANs and long-haul networks (LHN). Theme park attractions with dozens of pods networked to each other, and in turn networked to similar facilities at other locations, are easily attainable with today's technology.