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The Virtual Brewery Adventure is
a Virtual Environment experience developed for Sapporo
Beer of Japan. The exhibit is permanently installed in
the Visitor's Center of Sapporo's new office building
located in the Yebisu Gardens Place Development in the
Ebisu area of Tokyo - originally the site of Sapporo's
Yebisu Brewery built in 1887. The Virtual Brewery has
had over a million visitors since it opened to the general
public 6 days a week in October, 94 .
The viewer uses a 3-D display device
called a BOOM, developed originally in our lab at NASA
and later commercialized by Fakespace. We modified the
BOOM so that it was appropriate for a public installation--we
ruggedized it and put extra safety devices on it. Visitors
at the exhibit also have the option of looking through
one of 12 passive viewers, which are essentially BOOM
heads without the mechanical linkage. Although visitors
can't control the viewpoint through the passive viewers,
they do get the same immersive experience. Further, large
projection screens show 2-D images of what the BOOM users
are seeing. We also included 3-D sound, using the Acoustitron
II by Crystal River Engineering.
Visitors getting into the BOOM first
see a 3-D computer-generated model of the old Sapporo
brewery, which they can fly around until they eventually
arrive at the front door. After entering the brewery,
they fly through a huge tank of bubbling beer. A computer-generated
tour guide leads them down a long hallway to a large,
modern control room, similar to ones in new breweries
these days. The control room displays four windows looking
out on photorealistic, computer-generated images of the
brewing process. Here, the visitor has to choose which
of the four processes they wish to see, whether that is
brewing, fermentation, filtration or bottling. They look
at the desired window, push a button on the BOOM handle,
and are pulled out into a microscopic world. The first
window represents the brewing process.Viewers travel along
with the starches that are broken down into sugars.
The second view takes viewers through
the fermentation process, where yeasts, used to break
down the beer into alcohol, carbon dioxide and other products,
bud and create colonies. The third perspective takes the
viewer on a roller-coaster ride through the filtration
process, which ends with a ceramic filter that blocks
yeast and impurities out of the beer. The last window
is a surreal interpretation of the bottling process. Lines
of bottles float around in space. Beer comes out of nowhere
to fill the bottles; at some point, the caps land on the
bottle tops. Finally, the Sapporo labels slap onto the
bottles.
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