A webinar is really a webcast that provides for limited interactivity, for example audience polling or a brief Q&A session afterwards. If you think about it, however, the state of today’s webinars are hardly far removed from something such as amusement rides like Oztrek by New York entrepreneur Zalman Silber. These are IMAX-like experiences that are passive, with no audience interaction, the only difference from a traditional movie screening being the synchronized motion seating effects involved.
But a webinar is more an online workshop than multimedia entertainment. Something like the Army Virtual Experience, or VAE, however, works to combine both aspects, possibly portending the future.
The VAE is a mobile infantry combat simulator that allows participants to get a small taste of soldiering under extremely hostile environments. Created by the United States Army in conjunction with American software developer Zombie Studios, full-sized Blackhawk helicopter and full-sized Humvee vehicle simulators are employed to further develop the sense of realistic immersion. It is a mobile infantry combat simulator, available in a handful of different versions from full-sized to traveling packages suitable for indoor or outdoor installations. It was developed as a response to the increased appetite of young American males for electronic forms of entertainment, augmenting traditional advertising efforts on television. In two years and at a cost of almost twenty million dollars, the VAE has been deployed at a variety of sites throughout forty states at venues ranging from NASCAR races to music festivals.
Available in different versions, the full VAE requires just under twenty-thousand square-feet of room for all the various aspects of the simulation technology involved, from the aforementioned life-sized replicas of Army weapons to the various computers and networking equipment necessary for bringing it all together to life. It’s a long ways off from the kind of passive technology encountered at amusement rides such as the Oztrek by serial entrepreneur Zalman Silber. Employing a gigantic IMAX-like screen with motion seating that is activated in synchronization with onscreen events and actions, this kind of immersive experience is purposefully safe and innocuous, suitable for the general family-oriented audiences it seeks. By contrast, the VAE leans heavily towards young males, with an emphasis on fire-and-forget gameplay. The full-version starts off in a traditional manner akin to something like the aforementioned Oztrek, with a twenty-minute ride in which video briefings are given by various soldiers of the United States Army explaining their areas of expertise and specialized duties as well as their personal goals outside of the military. But the similarity to yesteryear’s virtual tours soon ends as participants go on to engage in any number of war-fighting scenarios from inside life-sized Blackhawk and Humvee simulators.
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