Experience Required

Just across the floor from Advanced Animations, show attendees in suits were strapping into parachute harnesses and donning virtual-reality goggles. A crowd had gathered. Peter Beale, 56, chairman and CEO of Illusion Inc., the company that makes this $45,000 parachute-jump simulator, said that he envisions simulators like this one someday being used in schools "to teach kids math by letting them drive the space shuttle, launch a satellite, and gather data. In the evening, they could use the same vehicle to fight aliens."

On the second of my three days at IAAPA, I stopped by the Iwerks Entertainment booth to see a demo of its turn-key 3-D/4-D FX Theatre. Iwerks was founded in 1986 by Don Iwerks, who is the son of the late Ub Iwerks, Walt Disney's original collaborator. Iwerks was at the show selling a more compact, more affordable version of the 3-D/4-D experience -- an idea that marries a 3-D film with various in-theater effects, such as water dripping from the ceiling and air blasting in your face.

The demo film, which featured Leslie Nielsen as a pirate, was riddled with glitches. Part of the sound track was missing, and the 3-D image was out of registration. "This is making me dizzy," groaned Chuck Goldwater, Iwerks's then-president and CEO, who was sitting next to me. He got up to see what had gone wrong. A power surge had rattled Iwerks's high-definition digital projector. Goldwater restarted the movie, and we watched it again.

Afterward, standing in the projection room amid scattered cardboard boxes and racks of computer equipment, Goldwater explained that Iwerks saw some of its biggest opportunities in "museums, malls, and science centers. Our mission is to take the best theme-park attractions and put them where the people are. Cultural institutions and retailers have to be able to compete with home shopping and with home learning. They have to give their customers something compelling."

"There are only about 100 theme-park operators who [at a cost of $2 million to $3 million] could afford this kind of an attraction," Goldwater continued. "But there are lots of new prospects outside that universe. Expanding beyond theme parks is our optimism for the future."

Themed Entertainment Association president Brian Edwards -- who is also president of Edwards Technologies, a company that designs and installs audio, video, and show-control systems -- is even more emphatic about the potential for themers to colonize the rest of the world. Sitting at a roundtable in his booth, Edwards argues that any business that feels as if it's on the verge of being disintermediated by the Internet should be thinking about turning itself into a purveyor of experience.

"Think about travel agents," Edwards says. "They're almost hosed. You can do your own research on the Internet. What's the purpose of a retail outlet? You know more about the destination that you're interested in than the travel agent does. On the Web, you can watch a video of the Taj Mahal. The best that a travel agent can do is give you a brochure.

"But what if travel agents could give you 3-D films and 360-degree films about various destinations?" Edwards continues. "What if they could offer an interactive, immersive experience that would help you select your destination? They have to get into the experience, the storytelling. They have to be more engaging if they want to survive in the future."

Inside an Experience

We're driving south on I-5 in Bob Rogers's navy-blue GMC Yukon, toward Knott's Berry Farm, in Orange County. Rogers wants to show me the "Mystery Lodge" -- an attraction based on the "Spirit Lodge," which he developed for Expo '86, in Vancouver.

If there is such a thing as a scholar of the theme-park genre, Rogers is one. He's in an effusive mood, and, for the duration of the 45-minute trip from Burbank to Buena Park, he talks about the physiological changes in the human brain that cause adults to lose their appreciation for roller coasters, how crowds move through various theme parks, and the history of Knott's.

Just as car makers and museum curators today are sliding into the experience economy, farmer Walter Knott made the transition starting in the 1930s. To supplement revenues from selling jams and jellies, Knott and his wife, Cordelia, began serving chicken dinners to customers.

"The chicken dinners got so popular," Rogers says, "that Walter Knott started buying buildings in deserted towns throughout the West and bringing them to the farm, just so people would have something to look at while they waited in line." Over the next several decades, Knott added a mine ride, a log flume, and, for educational value, an exact replica of Philadelphia's Independence Hall. Before long, the Knotts found that they weren't cultivating berries anymore -- they were running America's first theme park.