Replicating the real world
It’s A Small World! And technology has paved the way for it. We take the kids to Disneyland, Amsterdam, Niagara Falls, Waikiki or the Kona Coast in Maui, Paris, London, Rome, Japan’s Mt. Fuji, and other destinations right here on Saipan.
It is happening now in Las Vegas and Japan. Vegas built a city replicating the European experience, complete with the famous Paris Eifel Tower. Soon, another hotel with a theme park would be completed–a hotel of scale–to give any visitor a sense of that much dreamed of trip to an exotic island in the Pacific right in the heart of Vegas.
Las Vegas is able to replicate virtual cities and exotic places in its hotels of scale because it has the money to spend on the requisite technology. It enables a visitor to experience virtual reality of, i.e., a volcanic eruption, followed by a tsunami rolling towards you on a 90 foot screen. You feel its violence as it crashes and water is sprayed all over your face as you sit in your chair in a huge entertainment arcade.
It’s happening close by these isles too.
There’s the Ocean Dome in Miyazaki, Japan, where the sun beams through clear blue skies, waves rolling in gently at the shore, as children with floats frolic at water’s edge.
Time Magazine’s Travel Watch (5/1/100) says it was all done by human hands where the natural environment is “shaped”.
“Swimmers don’t have to worry about such inconveniences as tides and currents, and they are shielded from the quirks of sea creatures.
Even the sand, actually crushed marble designed to not stick to your skin, is new and improved.” At the stroke of a keyboard, the artificial ocean can be adjusted from a calm seascape perfect for kids and sand castles to a surfer’s paradise with swells of up to seven feet, sufficiently wavy for pro-surfing competitions. The roof can be opened or closed, depending on the desirability of the outside weather.
“Technological efforts in Japan have often been devoted to recreating the real world, and the result is a bewildering array of virtual-reality fun around the country. There’s the snow-covered indoor hills such as Ski Dome, half an hour outside of Tokyo which provides a year-round wintry experience. Simulation is a staple of life in the Japanese entertainment industry, which has created reproductions of Spain, Germany, Russia and Holland.
“Michitaka Hirose, a professor specializing in virtual-reality technology at Tokyo University, traces Japan’s thriving artificial entertainment industry to the art of bonsai, in which medieval nobility honed the reshaping of nature into an art form. Well, if Japan eventually replicates virtual tours of such places as Hawaii, Guam and Saipan, how would this form of entertainment affect tourism in these destinations?
Obviously, such trips to exotic islands located in nearby Osaka, Tokyo and other cities where one can do virtual sailing, canoeing, fishing, surfing, or commuting with nature, would simply translate into keeping everything right in the Land of the Rising Sun. Wealth and technology has its strength.
Sure, I’d love to go fishing in a virtual lagoon where I don’t have to worry about deep blue sea creatures like sharks or other strange-eyed sea monsters salivating to dine on one of my two skinny legs.
Virtual reality is the in-thing in the superficial entertainment industry in Japan. It’ll be good to explore how this industry has affected the NMI’s tourism industry. Obviously, when the Japanese economy took a turn for the worse, people simply decided to stay home. True or False?
