Anyone ever get to try Disney's VR at Epcot in ~1994?

I have a distinct memory of a visit to Epcot when I was a kid and seeing this amazing VR tech demo where you could sit on a jet-ski-like arcade controller, put on this really heavy HMD, and fly around on Aladdin's carpet for a few minutes. I do not know how there wasn't a super long line, or maybe there was, but I somehow was lucky enough to get my few minutes with the insanely expensive thing, and it definitely blew my fucking mind. It was way ahead of its time and felt like some magical future sci-fi tech none of us would ever see again. They ran a 60fps demo on million-dollar SGI machines. They let you see the massive and colorful SGI beasts (as well as the development team!) through a large glass window into the next room. This was a year when our $2000 home PC was barely able to run Doom. I also am amazed they managed to pull this off without a bunch of people getting motion sick.

It took 20 years but now I have an unbelievably better VR setup in my room and it cost me a few hundred bucks. Gives me goosebumps to think what might be on my desk in another 20 years.

I hoped to find some history on this to see if my memory was right and luckily there's this excellent blog post from 2012 by Avi Bar-Zeev, one of the engineers who worked on it. It's a fascinating read.

Anyway, the main reason it wasn’t commercialized was the cost and logistics. As far as Disney rides go, they tend to be very expensive. But you have to look at the throughput to make it up. For VR, it took 5 minutes to on-board each guest plus a 5 minute ride @ 500k/seat (not including the HMD and motion base, which we left off). That’s less than a hundred people a day per seat, vs. many thousands for a rollercoaster.

Turns out Avi also co-founded Keyhole (Google Earth), helped build Second Life, and what do you think he's up to these days? Gotta be another crazy sci-fi tech: Amazon Prime Air. :) Surprised he's not been snapped up by Oculus, actually!

I did not, but I'm curious about this.

I was fortunate enough to be one of the four picked from the crowd to go on stage for the Aladdin demonstration at Imagineering. It was pretty amazing for the time. The size of that N Vision Viewport HMD was pretty intimidating. I srecall going on a in-game scavenger hunt and failing misserably. I have been excited about VR ever since.

No but I played Dactyl Nightmare about a half-dozen times in 1992. It was not as amazing as this Epcot thing sounds.

I never went on it, but I do remember it. It was one of the big things about Epcot at the time.

They had similar stuff at the malls in Cali, though. It wasn't just a thing in Epcot. Although, I'd guess the one at Epcot was probably better.

That being said, the new star tours at Disneyland (which I only saw this year in April for the first time) is awful and I liked the old one better. It's like a step backwards.

"Now you have to wear glasses!"

"How is this better than not wearing anything special at all?"

"It's... it's glasses so its 3d and... wooo Darth Vader picks someone out of the crowd to be a rebel"

"That Darth Vader thing is cool, but otherwise this is stupid"

"Ya, I know. We need to make this thing new somehow, but I'm not as smart as people in the 70s and 80s. I don't know how to make things better."

"I know, it's ok, I know."

I was also selected from the crowd to demonstrate the VR technology. It was so cool. I was 22 and I remember trying to (virtually) fly out of the program. I think the idea was to find Aladdin's lamp. I just kept flying all over the place. I didn't want it to end. Great experience.

@drzing: Yes dude! I talk about this all the time and have/had zero proof this was a thing. I was like 13 years old or so. Was at Epcot and my cousin and I lined up like hours early for this thing. I kept asking to be able to demo this thing and they kept saying wait until the show and we pick people. A few minutes before it started someone came out to the line and grabbed me to try this out.

It made such a huge impression on me that I had been waiting for VR to become commercially available ever since...for like 20-25 years... Never forgot about it once. Any time talks about Oculus came up or any other potential VR tech, I always told my story about this. It was insane. I remember first seeing the vr world and looking in a mirror and at my hands and seeing that I was mickey mouse. The crazy weird contraption was the magic carpet. I recall there being a feeling of wind while flying on the carpet. The whole experience was just insane.

Now all these years later, I'm loving PSVR and the Gear, and Oculus, etc.

NOTE: interestingly enough, someone in this thread posted a post about this, and I dont think the pictures n the post are from what I am talking about. The thing I did all the rigs were behind a glass wall, and the other side had seats for people to sit in and watch the big screens behind the users. Also, I remember everything being very grey and plain. I think the pics in the linked post are from when they made the vr "rides" actual attractions to park goers.

Unfortunately I did not, but this sounds really cool!

The first time I went to Epcot was in 1999. They had a room full of Sega Saturn games and a friend and I got a private 2 on 1 demonstration of the Dreamcast months before release.

One of the cooler Disney VR rides I remember was getting strapped into this big half-circle machine with each of us strapped into a harness and given a "lightsaber" that we used to fight off people attacking our ship or whatever. My parents were not that impressed but I remember it being the coolest thing ever since everyone was looking around and swinging at these things no one else could see. Now that I'm thinking about it I don't remember if it was full VR in that you could see what the person next to you was doing or if it was more AR in that they were still visible but with monsters and score added on top. Either way damn that was cool thanks for jogging my memory of that!

Nope, but I did get to try some mid-90s VR tech at some event or another as a kid. Unfortunately, it was a complete bust. Couldn't see shit since I wasn't able to wear glasses in the HMD, and I didn't really get that I could look around, so I stayed stone still and looked straight ahead while trying to shoot terribly blurry triangles with whatever light gun they used for the approximately 70 seconds I had it on.

(in hindsight, my demo was so short likely because nobody trusts a crazy expensive piece of hardware on the head of a gawky, clumsy-looking 10 year old)

Still, it planted a seed of excitement, and it felt amazing to do right by young me 20 years later and hook him up with some proper VR, haha.