Step into the future

In the quiet Vi­enne re­gion of France, a group of in­domitable Gauls have turned their backs on the in­flu­ence of glob­al­i­sa­tion with its iden­ti­cal theme parks and fran­chises to come up with a sin­gu­lar pro­ject: Fu­tur­o­scope. Unique as it is, how­ever, it still has all the thrill and ad­ven­ture of its com­mer­cial cousins. After all, what could be more ex­cit­ing than being pro­pelled into the fu­ture?

This is pre­cisely what the French theme park of­fers with a host of at­trac­tions re­lated to sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy. This year, vis­i­tors will be ex­posed to the bound­ary be­tween hu­mans and ma­chines, which is be­com­ing in­creas­ingly thin thanks to an­droid ro­bots we can in­ter­act with to the point that some­how it seems they can even in­ter­pret our feel­ings.

Ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence is a con­stant pres­ence in the ex­hi­bi­tion, which de­parts from the con­ven­tions of mu­se­ums and more often than not re­sem­bles a games room. If all goes as the ex­hi­bi­tion pre­dicts, AI will help make our lives eas­ier, whether it is plan­ning our jour­ney to work or ad­vis­ing us what clothes will best suit the day ahead.

Then there is deal­ing with com­put­ers, which is be­com­ing more in­tu­itive and less cum­ber­some thanks to voice recog­ni­tion and bio­met­ric tools that, along with deep learn­ing, will help our ma­chines to get to know us bet­ter and an­tic­i­pate our wishes. We will even be able to recre­ate our day-to-day liv­ing en­vi­ron­ment, chang­ing it at will from, for ex­am­ple, a Man­hat­tan loft to a rain­for­est tree­house sur­rounded by singing birds.

En­cour­ag­ing cre­ativ­ity and imag­i­na­tion has al­ways been among the aims of the park and it has a sec­tion de­voted solely to this, with 3D print­ing and vir­tual re­al­ity, two tech­nolo­gies which will make their marks in com­ing years. Here, it is all about being hands-on.

Tra­di­tion­ally, the park has to offer out­stand­ing ex­pe­ri­ences that are fun and ed­u­ca­tional at the same time. So far in 2016 it has re­mained true to this spirit. An ex­am­ple is the new 3D film, The Law of the Strongest. Bear­ing the seal of qual­ity guar­an­teed by BBC Earth, it shows the ad­ven­tures of a mouse in the Sono­ran Desert and a squir­rel in a Nordic for­est, thanks to a ren­o­vated Imax cin­ema with a new 4K laser video sys­tem.

Na­tional Ge­o­graphic, an­other as­sur­ance of qual­ity, is be­hind one of this year's nov­el­ties aimed at mak­ing us aware of every­thing that es­capes our main sense. Mys­ter­ies of the Un­seen World shows vis­i­tors the amaz­ing mi­cro­scopic phe­nom­ena we do not see around us, and is housed under the dome of one of the unique build­ings that make up the park. In fact, the spec­tac­u­lar ar­chi­tec­ture of the Fu­tur­o­scope build­ings is it­self a fea­ture, as each is dif­fer­ent and im­presses in its own way.

How­ever, at Fu­tur­o­scope 3D is not enough, so wel­come to 4D. Amaz­ing video map­ping with the col­lab­o­ra­tion of Cirque du Soleil in a nightly show, La Forge aux étoiles. Vis­i­tors also get to ex­pe­ri­ence scenes from the sil­ver screen in real time and learn how films such as Min­i­moys by Luc Besson are made.

Fu­tur­o­scope is mag­i­cal, but in 2016, it steps into the fu­ture.

Fu­tur­o­scope was founded in 1987 near the city of Poitiers in the hope of bring­ing new life to a pre­dom­i­nantly agri­cul­tural area. It is an in­no­v­a­tive pro­posal that pro­vides an out­stand­ing level of im­mer­sion thanks to the con­flu­ence of the lat­est in­no­va­tions in ro­bot­ics and film. Today, it is the sec­ond most vis­ited theme park in the coun­try, with more than 1.8 mil­lion vis­i­tors a year. The park ad­min­is­tra­tion has a pol­icy of rein­vest­ing 10% of the turnover each year and into re­new­ing 20% of the at­trac­tions. As a re­sult, the park is in a state of con­stant evo­lu­tion. In ad­di­tion, next sea­son, Fu­turescope will cel­e­brate its 30th an­niver­sary with a new at­trac­tion set around the fig­ure of Jules Verne which will doubtlessly be spec­tac­u­lar, as will the ex­pe­ri­ence a flight of five min­utes for 84 peo­ple, all at once. With a bud­get of €13 mil­lion it is the most ex­pen­sive in­vest­ment the park has ever made.