Inside the Jumbo Hostel in Stockholm, Sweden.

In Stockholm’s Jumbo Hostel you can stay the night inside a jumbo jet. What will be tomorrow’s transportation? Teleportation? Will the future bring transportation to our fingertips?

A confluence of entertainment and transportation will likely occur. They will converge into one. They will mesh and coincide. Enter the Manhattan Airport Foundation and its proposed project to build an airport in New York’s Central Park.

3D panorama of the hoax airport plan by parody advocacy organization Manhattan Airport Foundation.

Evidence points to the project being a hoax. But after hearing the concept, thinking about its potential, and reading more about it, I would say they do deliver some interesting points. The environmental argument sounds sound, and the park’s landmarks would be converted to attractions inside the airport. Innovative design and engineering could make a project like this a huge success for New York City. Maybe I’ve seen The Fifth Element too many times, but I’ll tell you that I can even see radically broadening the project’s scope. Artistic attractions and inventive modes of entertainment could be immersed within it. The airport itself could become a cultural center. Local artwork could be featured in the terminals. Digital technology would be everywhere. A live music venue could be built under the airport. Imagine flying into Manhattan to see a concert right in the airport. I expressed that live music is the most entertaining music when I first covered music’s future evolution, and I think an airport music venue is absolutely viable providing it would be open to everyone—not just upper or business classes.

What creative forms of art, culture, and entertainment could you see being built in modern airports? Where else might entertainment blend with transportation? With our basic survival needs met, what do we seek in and beyond entertainment?

As a club-goer in the game’s easy mode, you would be 21+ or 18+ depending on the country or venue rules. With your politeness and your ID, you would pass through the bouncer and get inside to have more interactions inside the venue or on the dance floor. In the advanced mode, you would be underage, and you would have to try to pass a fake ID, or invent a way in without one—a lie, another entrance, etc. Once inside you would be able to see, hear, move around, and interact just as you would in a real, live venue. You would get to witness an actual, or virtualized, video stream from the venue. The setting choices for the game might be bars, clubs, concerts, festivals, or any other type of music venue. They could be real or fictitious, and who’s to say what’s real? Level 1 could start on the city street outside a dive bar, and in the subsequent levels the player would work up to larger and larger venues.

As a bouncer in the game’s easy mode, you would have to be polite as you worked the door, checked ID’s, spotted fake ones, and greeted incoming club-goers. Bouncers would lose points for being rude, or for mishandling the crowds. In more advanced bouncer modes, you would have to responsibly prevent violent behavior, by pacifying out-of-control partiers without causing them any physical harm. As for the game levels, the bouncers could start out working for a dive bar, and work up to nicer and nicer jobs at different venues. Even job interview interactions could be simulated in the game.

Maybe you could not attend a real-life Radiohead show in London, but in VirtualVenue you could. Music would be featured throughout the game, and licensing would be paid to those real-life musicians whose songs and live appearances were used in the game. The company that produced this game could generate huge revenues by selling advertising to actual venues, and having them featured as game-setting locations with live, 3D, video feeds of the actual performances. With the game connected to the internet, and the touring artists in the game being real, ticketing companies could pay to have their gig listings in the game, which would increase actual ticket sales and further promote the artists and the venues. A third revenue stream for the game company could be selling subscriptions, of the behavioral data findings, to robotics developers, or to security industry professionals who would want to know all the latest security flaws and use that knowledge to tighten real-life security.

There are myriad ways to expand on all of these ideas. The game could work best in a mashup with social networks, and enable you to play with real people from around the globe.

I think that crowdsourcing videogame technology could lead to the training of real, digital bouncers—an idea that I don’t think is too bizarre. The VirtualVenue network could aggregate data about how players reacted in different situations, and help teach computers human-like behavior. The data crowdsourcing model is already widely used. For example the familiar reCaptcha essentially uses humans to teach computers to read our handwriting for the purpose of digitizing books. Crowdsourcing leads to open innovation, and we may not be far from crowdsourced, robot-teaching technology becoming a mainstream reality. This game, and others like it, could include physical and vocal input from the player, making the game feel more realistic, and opening doors to teaching robots our body language, and our spoken languages. It will be key that we maintain ethics and use this technology in smart ways, because we’ve all seen Terminator and can imagine how this sort of technology might explode. How can we ensure that the relationship between humans and computers remains symbiotic? Computers educated by humans…where might this lead?

Upcoming: We aim to look at this issue in reverse—how videogame technology might enrich our learning through virtual education—see virtualmusic.tv/education/