Where Space Cadets Rule

To the uninitiated, Virtual World--which dubs itself “the world’s first digital theme park”--can be pretty disorienting.

The place appears to be a “Star Wars” lounge, with an inexplicable hodgepodge of high-tech gizmos, lab-coated employees, Victorian furniture and early aviation-era artifacts. Periodically, the PA system announces the imminent departure of “missions” with code names--Alpha 28 and Beta 12.

“The question we get the most here is, ‘What is this place?’ ” says Kecia Millanponce, marketing manager for Virtual World’s Old Town Pasadena location. “What we are,” she explains, “is a cockpit-based, virtual reality entertainment center.

“We translocate pilots every five minutes to Solara 7 or the Red Planet. It’s completely interactive. We run on an ARC-net system, which gives our cockpits the ability to instantly communicate with each other.”

Got that? Well, translated, that means that for about the price of a movie, Virtual World will put you in an enclosed cockpit with a throttle, joystick and video screen, where, for 10 minutes, you engage in a 30th-Century war scenario called “BattleTech,” which takes place on Solara 7, or race through Martian canals in “The Red Planet” a mere half-century into the future.

The unique thing is that in either case, you compete not against the machine but against your similarly enclosed neighbors. Surrounding this gee-whiz, high-tech core is a fantasy culture built around a fictitious entity called Virtual Geographic League.

Virtual World staff (er, technicians) prefer the word pilot to customer, and mission to the more prosaic game. Also, pilots and technicians refer to each other by self-selected code names (Millanponce’s is Echo).

There’s a pre-mission briefing, mostly a training film (starring Judge Reinhold, Weird Al Yankovic, Cheech Marin and a host of character actors) as well as a post-mission debriefing, where all pilots get a computer printout with breakdowns of their scores and are shown satellite-view instant replays of their missions.

If all this sounds too complicated or too expensive, you could just come and hang out. “We encourage people to come in, sit down, have a cup of coffee, watch some actual missions in progress,” Millanponce says, indicating the TV monitors that broadcast the virtual goings-on. “If people decide they want to book one of our missions, they go to our reservations desk where one of our technicians goes ahead and books them.”

The nonalcoholic bar offers a variety of snacks, plus the Johnny Rockets menu. The adjacent Internet booth allows you to interact with people at other Virtual World locations around the world as well as with desk-bound pilots logging on from their homes.

“It’s sort of like hanging out at a bar,” says Adrian Norman, a 19-year-old UCLA student, who is playing “Magic,” a fantasy card game, with a friend.

Norman, who goes by the handle Scipio, says he’s been coming to Virtual World almost every day for the past few months and he’s on a championship team that is set to do battle with teams from other sites in the Virtual World Cup in Las Vegas in June.

When he comes to Virtual World, “I might do one mission just to keep in practice,” he says. “And the rest of the time I just hang out.”

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Where: Virtual World, One Colorado Blvd., Pasadena. (818) 577-9896. Other Southern California locations are 1875-A/219 Newport Blvd., Triangle Square, Costa Mesa (714) 646-2495 and 7510 Hazard Center Drive #211, San Diego (619) 294-9200.

When: 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Sunday-Thursday; 10 a.m.-1 a.m. Friday and Saturday. Reservations suggested on weekends.

Cost: $7 per mission before 5 p.m. on weekdays; $8 after 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday; $9 after 5 p.m. Friday and all day on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays. There is a $1 one-time processing fee.