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Trends Brands List A Z Sony Electronics Sony Playstation Fashion Metreon San Francisco
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Sony
Metreon hits big in San Francisco
©1999 Streetmedia-
What is Metreon? Is it a mall
or an entertainment theme park with shopping? Metreon has a front desk that looks
like a hotel registration desk, but you don't "check in". Metreon has a Microsoft
software retail store that sells logo t-shirts, but there are no nerdy programmers.
And Metreon has a "Wild Things" theme area and OmniMax (3D) theatre, but there
is no museum. So we set out to figure out what Metreon intends to be...
Here's a short list of "attractions" you can find inside the Metreon complex:
The Discovery Channel Store, Sony Music and Electronics Superstore, Wild Things
theme area, Sony Theatres (10 screens), Firewood fusion restaurant, Jillian's
Restaurant with live television-braodcasting feed, the Airtight Garage video arcade
with full-size "video bowling", and the Lounge. The Sony Theatres ticket area
is lively enough by itself to take up a half-hour with your date watching the
schedule feed scroll down the digital ticket board. Situated directly in front
of the Discovery Channel Store, you can wait in line and turn around to watch
the television matrix of 30x5 large flat-panel screens showing scenes of African
wildlife and Artic glaciers.
It can be a bit intimidating at first. Metreon is really the first public commercial
complex in America to bring the "surround" feeling of the Internet into a physical
space. Sensory stimulation follows you from the entrance hall, which has silver
metallic standing billboard posters for the movies showing and coming, through
the central junction at the service desk (image above), where space-age ATM modules
protrude into your vision along with criss-crossing aluminum arc beams, up the
escalators to the Airtight Garage, built into a dark cave-like room with individual
standing game panels clustered in pods. Airtight Garage boasts multi-player "floater"
games, where you guide your running floater person through arenas shooting at
other players, a Virtual Reality space travel module with two-seater flyers participating
in deep space docking and mining maneuvers, and the infamous life-size Video Bowling,
where the bowler stands at a console and "rolls" the ball by spinning a bowling-ball-sized
trac ball; on-screen, the ball rolls down the streets of San Francisco through
cable cars and up and down the hills to finally hit the pins. Got enough yet?!
Here's an analogy: Fine art buffs play a game where they stand a blind-folded
friend in front of a Mark Rothko painting, pull off the blind-fold, and ask the
friend to describe how far they are from the painting. It's tricky because a Rothko
peice is so deep in color that often you feel like you are inside the painting,
or very close to it. The thinkness of the paint colors confuses the mind's ability
to determine depth. Think of Metreon the same way. Standing inside the complex,
you almost always forget how far inside it you really are; the entrance and exit
doors maybe only 50 feet away, but there is so much sensory stimulation going
on that you lose the ability to keep the "map" in your head. Only after dozens
of visits to various venues does your mind start to orient itself to the new walking
and visual patterns. Like the Rothko, Metreon imprints a profound visual impression
on the mind, and makes other mall experiences seem bland. Sony has translated
the experiences of PlayStation gaming into public meandering.
So what, then, is Metreon? Time will reveal that Metreon is the first generation
of a new form of public space, a new "amphitheatre of the Modern Age". Like
the public areas of Rome, Metreon displays the best exhibits of the creations
of our time, such as the immediate media access to the wilds of Africa and
ocean sharks. At the same time, it invites you to just hang out, through
food venues that are upscale but convenient and share a common dining space.
And through the use of vertical as well as horizontal integration, Metreon
creates the illusion that you, each person, is at the center of the activity,
at once anonymous and private as well as public and on display. Perhaps
the best foreshadowing of Metreon was the movie "Demolition Man" where Sylvestor
Stallone chased Wesley Snipes through glass-crashing and console-smashing
scenes with Sandra Bullock in a land where Taco Bell was the "winner" and
television commercial jingles formed the cultural drumbeat. For now, Metreon
is our first glimpse of the future of commerical public entertainment and
shopping experiences.
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