A glimpse into suburban entertainment of the near future
We drove out to an area in Kansas City, Kansas (KCK) called Legends. The area was already an established tourist destination. Rumor has it, the new football stadium was going to be built nearby. I kept my eyes open for data centers. This was exactly the sort of place data centers were being built.
I had never heard of Atlas9. This was the first, and based on my experience, they still have some kinks to work out. The building itself was largely nondescript. The lobby was made to look like a movie marquee from the not-too-distant past. There was an old RV that you could explore in the lobby. Inside the RV were all sorts of analog machinery bits from the 80s and 90s. There was even a KISS 8-track cartridge and a DOS for Dummies book, just to give you an idea of the vibe. You could tell by the looks of many of the people there that this was going to be pretty nerdy.
The person behind the counter put orange wristbands on each of us. They each had unique QR codes and I later found out they also contained RFID tags. The briefing we received before our "quest" began was thin. Something about movies coming alive or something. I didn't understand much beyond the need to scan our wristbands along the way, but before we began, our facial biometrics were harvested. As we worked our way through tens of thousands of square feet of props, many of which reminded me of the sort of things you would find at Apex Surplus in Los Angeles, I couldn't help but think it could all be so much simpler. Maybe instead of one big quest, you could do smaller quests. One minute you're in an art deco jazz club and the next minute you're crawling through an air duct on your hands and knees into a room with computer terminals. Then there was the movie theater, a real bar that was serving alcoholic beverages. There was little continuity. I was lost.
There were several places where wristbands were scanned and a poster with an AI-generated version of my face was superimposed on the body of a character. One of the images only had glasses, but they only covered one eye. What were they using? Midjourney from 2023? I could see what they were going for if I squinted, but it all felt thrown together. There was a point to it all, but it was all so complicated and convoluted. And who did all of this? Was it a company? An entrepreneur? And what was happening to the facial biometrics they were harvesting? My brother, who had purchased tickets in advance, had probably waived everyone's rights. He wasn't the type to care. He had nothing to hide.
When we got back to the house, I cut my wristband off and turned it over to examine the underside. You could clearly see the RFID tag. I scanned the QR code, which gave me access to all of the AI-generated images (PNG files stored on Firebase) and allowed me to see the progress I had made through the quest (not much). Of course I had to create an account first. Feels like this is the sort of thing most places would charge you for like the photos after you exit the roller coaster. I couldn't help but feel like I had experienced a version of near-future indoor entertainment. But it was clearly still in the alpha phase.