An entertainment wind tunnel is a wind tunnel used to blow people and is used to conduct indoor skydiving.

It is usually a vertical transparent tube several meters thick and more than ten meters high, with an electric fan underneath and a blocking net in the middle. When a person stands on the net, when the motor starts and the wind becomes stronger, the body will be subjected to the wind pressure from the bottom up and eventually float.

Wind pressure is related to air density, gravitational acceleration, and the square of wind speed. The frontal projection area for adults is about 0.5-0.8 square meters, and according to the standard wind pressure formula, when the wind speed is greater than 144 kilometers per hour, people lying on the fan may be blown up.

Converted to wind, this is equivalent to a category 14 hurricane, which is enough to set off waves of more than 15 meters on the surface of the sea, and can also cause huge damage on land. But in the entertainment wind tunnel, such a fierce wind force can only safely lift customers upwards, and then do a small job for environmental protection and smog reduction, helping to blow pollutants from the ground into the sky.

Of course, it's not easy to create a strong, stable, and controllable updraft, at least not with ordinary electric fans.

Fortunately, wind tunnels have been invented for 100 years, and there are more and more full-scale low-speed wind tunnels that can directly blow cars and even airplanes, and the related technology has long been mature. In 2005, the British company Airkix built a vertical wind tunnel to train skydivers, which it called Indoorskydiving.

Although the cost of electricity is very expensive, costing a mere £150 for 10 minutes, it is still a sensation in the UK, after all, it is still cheaper than a real skydive. And it's safer, even if the power goes off suddenly, the fan will gradually slow down, and people won't fall on the mesh floor.

Seeing that the British were making money, other wind tunnel companies patted their heads, "Isn't it just horizontal to vertical? It doesn't seem to be difficult!" and then built vertical wind tunnels with independent intellectual property rights. For example, the Mianyang Aerodynamic Research Center in China built the first entertainment wind tunnel in Asia in the second year, and the pneumatic center manages the largest professional wind tunnel group in Asia after the United States and Russia.

Compared with the speed of sound and hypersonic wind tunnels, the speed of more than 100 kilometers per hour can really only be regarded as low speed.

The Bee Garden, an entertainment wind tunnel, is the result of their cooperation with the Pneumatic Center, hoping to combine their VR technology with the latter's wind tunnel technology to create a second-generation entertainment wind tunnel.

It looks a bit like an oversized juicer, still uncovered. The lower two floors are the machine room and personnel passage, and in the middle is a 12-meter-high transparent cylinder that extends from the second floor to the outside.

Pointing to the transparent cylinder exposed, Atletico Madrid introduced to the American guests: "This way players can 'fly' out and see the scenery outside, which can add a lot of attraction." ”

"Although the average indoor skydive is novel and interesting, it is too expensive and the content is poor, and ordinary people can easily get bored with it and not easily form repeat customers. After all, no one likes to do continuous somersaults in the cage, otherwise anyone would be able to break Bale's world record,"

"It's not that simple," Roger Spreey shook his full head of gray hair, "I've also experienced the ifly project, and the physical strength and skill requirements are still very high, and ordinary people can't hold on as long as they do." ”

"God of Food" Bell Grylls was a special forces soldier of the British 21st Airborne Special Service Regiment (SAS), and in addition to surviving in the wilderness, shooting and driving, he is of course also good at parachuting. In a charity challenge, he and two others set a world record of 97 minutes suspended in a wind tunnel, which has yet to be broken.

Atletico looked at each other, "If you're thirty years younger, maybe you can try." ”

"Actually, I can do it now," the old man compared to an international bright muscle pose, "I'm not afraid of outdoor skydiving, let alone indoors." ”

However, he was just talking, and soon raised his own doubts: "I have also seen this kind of partially open-air vertical wind tunnel, if it is just like this, it seems that there is nothing new." ”

"Don't worry, I promise I'll surprise you later," said Atletico, leading the group into the small building.

There are some soundproofing measures in the small building, and the noise inside is much smaller than outside, giving the illusion that it is quiet.

There are exhibition boards hanging on the walls of the corridor, and there is no common work discipline and personnel publicity, all of which are posters of this "New Wind Tunnel" project.

Pointing to the first painting, Atletico explains: "Indoor skydivers usually provide customers with one-piece flight suits, elbow pads, knee pads, wind goggles and helmets, and some will also provide equipment similar to flying squirrel suits to improve buoyancy. We've made a number of improvements to this foundation, adding VR capabilities to the headset and jet styling to the flight suit, which greatly improves the consumer experience. ”

Turning his head to look at the diagram of the spray paint posture correction system, Roger found that it was composed of compressed air cylinders, intelligent control chips, and eight electronically controlled nozzles located on the hands, feet, navel, lower back, and crotch sides on both sides. It has two main functions, one is to maintain the body position to prevent the user from hitting the wall and accidents, and the other is to provide additional power to reduce the difficulty of realizing the somersault stunt.

The biggest difference between the wind tunnel and the general fan is that there is a distinction between the stable section, the contraction section and the experimental section, and the airflow is combed and evenly combed by the honeycomb network and damper in the stable section, and then accelerates in the shrinkage section, which can form a stable flow with the same flow direction and uniform speed within a certain distance.

For players in a vertical wind tunnel, the horizontal thrust is quite weak, and there is usually no wall bump, and even if it does, it doesn't hurt too much. Similarly, because the horizontal velocity is close to zero, with a small amount of power, the player can turn and flip from side to side, like a leaf falling in the wind.

After a little inquiry about the location of the compression cylinder, the old man's attention was attracted by the large photo on the third panel, and he pointed to the beautiful oriental girl on it and asked, "Is this the astronaut of your country?"

"No, no, she is the protagonist of our game, Cheng Wei from Galaxy Club. ”

Under the leadership of Blizzard's father, the game circle has risen up to "make games for ten years, engage in CG for nine years", and bee games are not exempt from vulgarity. With a lot of cinematic graphics and a spacesuit design full of homage elements, it's no wonder that the old man mistook it.

Of course, only these protagonist posters are movie-level, and the promotional video will fall to the TV level, and the actual game screen is even lower, which is also a member of the "photo fraud".

Pointing to the transparent passage next to him, Atletico explained: "At present, there are three games that have been adapted, namely weightlessness, flying, and skydiving. ”

The other two games are the skydiving gliding game Falling from the Sky and the flight simulation game Son of the Sky. They were originally designed for ordinary VR equipment and skydiving machines, but they are even better when modified to be placed here.

"Yes," Roger nodded, like most Americans, not very interested in the apparently Soccer variant of the Galaxy Ball.

Then he stopped in front of a hanging painting, glanced at the two white men on it, and found that they were all big celebrities he knew.

Turning to his head, he asked, "You still work with Felix Baumgartner and Luke Akins?"

Atletico nodded: "Yes, these two skydiving stars endorsed our "Falling from the Sky", and their deeds are a special match for this skydiving game, and they also participated in the post-debugging of the game. ”

Bee's regular games rarely invite spokespersons, but these VR motion games are an exception, as their hands-on experience and feedback are important for game development.

"Oh, I must try it, and I would love to learn them from jumping off the edge of the earth, but my doctor was adamantly against it, saying that my veins were a little hard," said the old man, full of regret.

Then he looked at Atletico Madrid and pouted: "It's you, you have a strong body and developed mobility ability, and the key is money, why don't you try it? People should see some different scenery in this life, and they will have no regrets in the future!"

"The problem is that I'm sorry now," Atletico lamented: "I had a small accident while performing a solo flying machine, and Jia Yi has banned me from doing these dangerous activities since then." Then I had to console myself with these realistic games. ”

"Understand, women are always worried about this. ”

Most people, due to financial and other reasons, usually don't have the opportunity to experience such thrilling moments, and can only experience the adrenaline-pumping, heart-pounding thrills of extreme athletes' helmet videos, such as Felixbaumgartner and Lukeaikins' thrilling jumps.

The former jumped from an altitude of about 39,000 meters four years ago and was the first person in the world to surpass the speed of sound without relying on an airplane rocket.

The latter, who had jumped from a height of about 7,900 metres a few months earlier, was the first person on Earth to successfully skydive without a parachute.

These two records are too dazzling and too valuable for gossip, and once they were exposed, they were spread on the Internet, which also made these two big bulls, who were only famous in the extreme circle, officially canonized and became the extreme gods in the eyes of ordinary people.

Even though Felix's record was later broken by Alan Eustace, then 57, Google's senior vice president of engineering and research, his name has been remembered by history.

Speaking of which, the reason why these people dare to try such an adventure is that in addition to their own technical experience, psychological tenacity, and professional partners to assist in these hearing conditions, the most important thing is sufficient scientific evidence and strong equipment support.

Needless to say, the special helium balloon that took Felix and Allen to the stratosphere was worth more than $70,000, and the special spacesuit they wore was worth $200,000, and the cost of the entire event was likely to exceed $500,000 when training preparation, logistical assistance, and insurance were added. Luke's skydive was also expensive, and the dummy that broke during the feasibility study alone was not a small amount of money.

Felix's stratosphere jump is sponsored by Red Bull Drinks, Luke's skydive is organized by Fox TV, and only Alan seems to be spending his own money, and of course, he is not short of this money from the gold-collar family.

It is precisely because of this situation that some netizens call extreme sports "exclusive to paying players of "Earth OL", and these skydivers are not bad for money.

The so-called "Earth OL" is naturally the life provided to us by the blue planet under our feet, no offline, no resurrection, global online, absolutely realistic, it couldn't be better.

Of course, even if the equipment is not explained, they can succeed in the end because the atmosphere is protecting them.

The velocity is relative, when the object falls downward, the air also produces wind pressure on it, and when it reaches a certain speed, the resistance will be balanced with gravity, resulting in the speed not increasing or decreasing into the uniform falling stage. This velocity is called the terminal velocity, the closing velocity, and its magnitude is related to the density of the air, the weight of the object, and the cross-sectional area.

That is, after a certain height, no matter how high a person jumps from, it will enter a constant state when it reaches the vicinity of the ground, maintaining a speed of 100 to 200 kilometers per hour, depending on the density of the air and body posture.

Felix and Allen would have jumped from the 40,000-meter-high stratosphere, and Luke would have jumped from the top of the troposphere nearly 8,000 meters, and they would all slow down to terminal speed. Then the first two open their parachutes to expand their cross-section to increase the power boost, gradually decelerate and finally land, while the latter glides to the designated landing point under the guidance of GPS, and then falls into the soft net high on the ground with a perfect back.

The reason why the first two can become men who break through the sound barrier in the flesh is because the atmosphere at high altitude is thin, and the air pressure and resistance are far less than those at low altitude. Therefore, they have to wear a special spacesuit that is cold-resistant, heat-resistant, self-pressurized, and oxygen-supplied, so as to ensure that they return to the ground alive, otherwise they will fall down and will be two high-altitude frozen corpses that have suffocated to death, adding a new footnote to "Why are there so few foreigners in the series".

The essence of "Wind Tunnel from the Sky" is to use a fan to blow out a suspended static state, simulating a skydiver with a finishing speed. The body's inner ear balancer can only recognize acceleration, and cannot directly distinguish between stationary and uniform linear motion, and as long as the VR image can fool the eye, it can make people believe that they are continuing to fall.

They even went a step further by using visual misdirection and a jet correction system to expand the range of space, allowing the player to glide forward while the nozzle also jets forward, never heading as long as the tank is not empty.

Putting on his helmet and walking into the flight area, old Roger's initial disapproval quickly vanished, and he was amazed by the gusting wind.