TNG always discussed the possibility of holodecks. I don’t think we have this tech at all yet, but what if instead of having a full holodeck, we can have a room which whisks you away to another world. What if we can enjoy our most amazing french dinner while feeling like we are sitting in Paris? Or perhaps enjoy a delicious jamaican meal – complete with fantastic rum – feeling like sitting right next to the beach, complete with sounds and smells?
So real it scares you.
Watch the following. It’s really mean, but it makes a good point.
It’s a screen, so realistic that the most absurd visuals on it, combined with good sound effects and some other special effects, convince people the city is really being destroyed.
Now, this is a mean-spirited prank, and the screen isn’t cheap. What if we took this idea and went with it a bit further.
Let’s expand this a bit.
Obviously we can imitate a single window effectively, LG just proved that. Probably with little work we could do an entire wall, possibly all walls in a room. We have had ultra realistic sound for pretty much a few decades now. We can easily do scents to match a specific video. Combine these elements and you have a room where you can be whisked away to anywhere in the world pretty realistically, for example, Paris, complete with sound and smell.
However, this would not be cheap, my estimates would be that it wouldn’t be that much more expensive than a fully decked out VIP section in a expensive restaurant or club. Now, people spend tons of money in a club or restaurant, and the more unique the experience the more people will shell out. So, why not put two and two together.
In the words of Gordon Ramsay.
Why not have a restaurant or club where you can rent the “holodeck” room. Where you experience is not just the food and drink, but travelling the world. Enjoying the food in the atmosphere it was meant to be enjoyed in. It would be the “most amazing” experience ever to enjoy with your food. Every aspect of it would be controlled; temperature, scents, sights, sounds.
You wouldn’t be able to walk past the walls, mind you, but who goes for a walk around when they are eating food anyways. The atmosphere would just be designed to amplify the enjoyment of the meal. The chef would not only be able to determine what you eat, but precisely what environment is around you to enjoy it in. Suddenly, the restaurant experience becomes complete and fully adaptable to the chef’s whims.
Why does this not exist?
“No one would pay for it!”
People are already paying a fortune for dinner experiences like the following:
Why would they not pay for the experience of enjoying something like that in a perfectly controlled environment? The investment isn’t anything more than the investment in these luxury clubs and restaurants, especially since you don’t need to put it on top of a building or in a very expensive location. You could build room after room, each one giving a tailored experience to your guests.
Techies are not chefs. (or chefs are not techies)
To put this politely, you are full of brown stuff if you actually believe this. Google Molecular Gastronomy and then we can chat.
Risk
This is risky, but starting a high-end restaurant is risky. If you aren’t willing to try something new that makes you stand out, you probably shouldn’t invest in one in the first place. If you can pull this off, combined with good food, you will easily book every room for every day.
Conclusions
This is just a neat idea, I realized it was possible when I saw OLEDs and 3d video without glasses at CES a couple of years back. Still kinda amazed no one is trying it out. Maybe we will see one soon.
Kelly J. Rose 
The problem is that it doesn’t work.
The only reason why 3D cinema is a good aproximation of a 3D enviroent is because people don’t move about. Something as slight as wobbling your head from side to side is sufficient to break the illusion that what you are seein is real. The only reason the people in this clip doesn’t immediately recognize that the window is actually a t.v. is that they are very focused and slightly nervous for the interview. It would not fool anyone who came to see the view.
True, you don’t move about much when eating dinner, but still a lot more than when you are watching a movie. Also, the cinema is able to cater to a large group of people because the screen is only on one side. In order to get full surround-video you need everyone to be more or less centred in the room, thus significantly reducing the amount of space available for seeting (and increasing the sceeen-cost per guest).
Would be cool if it did work, but the technology isn’t there yet.
I think that with a high enough resolution you can achieve realism on the walls. At very least you would be able to create a very interesting dining experience.
At the CES they showed a 3d TV tech without the glasses which apparently was quite good and powerful, but I’m betting crazy expensive.
It is not about the resolution, it is about the perspective.
Using stereoscopic methods you can create the impression that one object (A) is in front of another object (B). However, in “real 3D”, if you were to view two such objects and then move your head to the right, A would shift to the left relative to object B. Since this effect is not obtained by current 3D cinema, the brain will interpret the lack of “apparent motion” of object A to the left as being “actual motion” to the right (i.e. that A follows your head, always keeping the angle eyes-B-A the same). This gets dizzying really quickly since the brain detects a lot of movement.
That’s really interesting.
Honestly, I just know from what I’ve seen demos of and such and never actually saw it scaled up to the degrees that I would like to see.
Especially now that some of the companies are selling glasses-less 3d TVs, I just assumed they figured out some parts of that psychology.
There’s some work currently going on to try to make a surface that distorts at sub-visual wavelength scales. So you can do phase/amp/frequency holograms with a plate that changes _in real time_. Granted, the intended application is optical analog computing (related to quantum computers in the same way roughly as op-amps are to Turing machines), but it could eventually be adopted to televisions. The real limitation is the massive amounts of data to push/produce. You’d pretty much need a bundle of fiber optic cables coming out of the CPU. 😀