Experience Required

Today, while BRC still does work for theme parks -- it is designing a new Universal Studios outpost being built in Japan and a park called Discovery World being planned for Taiwan -- much of the crew's creative energy is concentrated on projects in less-conventional contexts. While theme-park-style design has stumbled a bit in the restaurant arena (most notably with the bankruptcies of both Steven Spielberg's Dive! and Planet Hollywood), it's only just gaining momentum with corporate brandlands, which can present a lengthy, uninterrupted ad to a captive audience, as well as with nonprofit institutions, which can charge higher ticket prices and, perhaps, have more of an impact on visitors.

"We call them content-based experiences," says Rogers, who emphatically describes BRC as a band of storytellers -- not technologists. "The audience walks in the front door and then walks out the back door several hours later. If people are the same when they walk out, that means that we've failed."

On the spacious second floor of BRC, digital countdown clocks inform project teams how many days, minutes, and seconds they have left until the curtain goes up on their show. Concept drawings, postcards, and panoramic photos of building sites cover almost every inch of wall space, and architectural models in various states of construction and deconstruction rest on nearly every table and desk. The atmosphere of the place is similar to that of a junior-high-school study hall just before a science fair.

Project manager Tony Mitchell, 46, a compact and energetic former ballet dancer from west Texas, is preparing to install an attraction called the "Sapmi Magic Theater" in northern Norway. The sets and props have already been built, and they're being shipped to Oslo. From there, they'll be trucked to Karasjok. Mitchell and his art director, Peter Hyde, 29, will spend some three months in Karasjok getting the attraction up and running.

The show asks a question that's very relevant to the indigenous Sapmi people, a nation of reindeer herders who live in several Scandinavian countries. As Mitchell puts it, "Is the outside world going to overwhelm the Sapmi culture?" Instead of relying exclusively on objects in glass cases and on text that's silk-screened on the wall to get visitors to consider that question, Hyde and Mitchell have created an effects-laden show that brings the audience temporarily into the world of the Sapmi people. Using digital projections on traditional Sapmi drums and on a fog screen -- artificial fog sandwiched by two currents of air -- Hyde and Mitchell will retell a Sapmi legend about the mythical white reindeer. They will then turn the theater into an outdoor environment on a winter's night, with fiber-optic stars twinkling overhead and a brief appearance by aurora borealis. The desired result is that visitors -- most of whom come from urban areas throughout Europe -- will be imbued with respect and reverence for a culture that is very different from their own.

Mike Chisman and Suzy Vanderbeek are starting to select vendors and cast actors for "Spirit of Texas," an attraction at the Texas State History Museum that will recap Texas history three times an hour. They've got diagrams and lists that detail every prop and scenic element that will be used for the fully automated show. The lists contain entries like "31 -- Galveston Wreckage with Little Girl three dimension set -- Stage Left Upper." Downstairs, Chisman shows me one of the theater seats for another show at the museum. The seats will make audience members feel as if they are experiencing a rattlesnake bite on their butts, the rumble of an approaching hurricane, and a swarm of locusts in their hair. It hardly sounds like an appealing travelogue for the state, but Chisman is sure that the seats, with their air bladders and transducers, will give visitors a thrill.

The team working on a brandland for Volkswagen's new Gläserne Manufaktur -- the assembly plant that will produce VW's forthcoming D Model luxury car -- is still trying to figure out which technologies will be ready for prime time when the place opens to the public next spring. The brandland will be targeted at visitors to Dresden, auto enthusiasts, and car buyers who have come to pick up their new D Model at its birthplace. There will be driving simulators -- actual D Models mounted on a moving platform that will make the cars seem to swerve, dip, and rumble. Visitors will be able to use one of the world's largest touch-screen displays to configure the D Model of their dreams and to see half-sized 3-D models of the car's interior and exterior. As a souvenir, visitors will get a picture of themsleves sitting inside a D Model, superimposed into the city of their choice.

An "augmented reality scope" will allow visitors to direct cameras to focus on particular areas of the manufacturing floor, to hear what's going on, and to read captions that provide details about the process. Webcams will provide a view of what's going on at other locations, such as the facility where the D Model engine is made.

Trying out new technologies in pursuit of education, cultural awareness, brand building, or just plain fun is what lends BRC an atmosphere of permanent brainstorming and pervasive creativity. Inside the main conference room at BRC headquarters is a table covered in white butcher paper, and every wall of the room is a tack-ready surface -- ready to accommodate an off-the-cuff sketch or a flowchart. The 80 full-time employees exist in a perpetual dream state, conjuring up environments that will tell stories, resuscitate history, and, as if by happenstance, teach.