Gulf winds blow through, canopy roads all the way to Thomasville.

Native names written on the land, echo through the red clay hills.

Where the scent of long-leaf Florida Pine, reach up on past that Georgia line.

Stroll through Tallahassee Town or Southern Apalachee bound.

Take the local routes and journey down the roads we call our home.

Take the local routes and journey down the roads we call our home.

Welcome to Local Routes.

I'm Suzanne Smith with WFSU Public Media.

We often take you to interesting places in our community on this program, but today we're taking you to a virtual world in space created by someone in our community.

WFSU's Mike Plummer introduces us to a man, a business and a VR ride at Railroad Square that takes you on a new kind of adventure.

Drive through Tallahassee's Railroad Square District and you'll find an Aqua Blue metal building called the Center for Alternate Reality.

Enter and you'll find Dr. Nick Satel, a mechanical engineer creating his own reality.

With a VR company called New World Rides.

What I want to do with New World Rides is take the immersive rides that you only get in the theme parks.

Out of the theme parks and provide them locally for people so that they don't have to go and spend several hundred dollars for admission.

Now, all of a sudden, they're in a tourist trap or other foods that hiked up and prices.

What we do is we bring it local, and then we also help the local businesses, local shops and restaurants in the area as well.

The Center for Alternate Reality is a kind of VR gaming space, but the main attraction in the room is the RotoLoco.

I'd always wanted to design roller coasters as a kid and growing up and got an idea for a new design for one and started working on a patent at that time.

And so around when I graduated grad school engineering started working on the first prototype, and that's what's behind me.

It's called the Roto Loco.

So it's a rotational motion platform for virtual reality that removes VR nausea, but then also creates compelling experiences for entertainment, training and therapy.

Nick tells me that to make virtual reality work successfully, the body must feel the same and virtual experience that the eyes are seeing.

In other words, motion and vision must be synchronized.

You have to have good tracking the tracking is not good.

You're going to mix.

You're going to make people disoriented.

You're going to make them sick.

And so a lot of what current VR developers for location based entertainment they try to do is they try to take conventional motion platforms, like something that's on a series of hydraulic cylinders that maybe just you a little bit then they just slap a VR headset on it and kind of call it a day.

But it's not capable of actually providing all the motion that they're putting the user through.

And that's where you get the mismatch and the accelerations, and that's where you start creating some uncomfortable situations.

So for this, the patent that we ended up getting is for translation and rotation.

So it's actually a pretty large system.

It's on the scale of a conventional roller coaster.

What we're really tracking here is the chairs.

The head of the headset has six degree of freedom tracking, and you can use that to look underneath tables and chairs and stuff.

But when you're in a chair now, that also rotates, you want to make sure that you're tracking whatever vehicle that chair is representing accurately.

The Roto Locos capable of full rotation.

360 degrees on all three axes.

So with that, you can you can make the riders rotate and virtually any direction at any point in time.

And so with that now you have a very good solid platform base where you can develop several different types of motion experiences on top of it.

Right.

Say you need an experience that just yours and pitch a little bit that can do it.

Or maybe you need something that can roll three 60.

The roll loco can also do that The ride called Shuttle 39 is designed for two people.

Both riders wear VR headsets and use a VR headset to perform their assigned tasks.

The pilot drives in the minor shoots at various shaped and colored targets.

The targets don't shoot back.

So each session gets a complete cycle so the writers are mining astronauts and they work for this space mining company.

And so their particular spaceship is shuttle number 39.

So that's why the title is called Shuttle 39.

And the Riders, before going into the ride, they have to pick their role where they can be the pilot or the collector The pilot controls the rotation of the ship during the ride and and points the ship towards the alien artifacts that they're finding along the way.

The collector controls the cannons of the ship to shoot at these artifacts to collect them.

And you have to navigate this asteroid where there is alien life around in the form of vegetation and animals.

And so they're trying to avoid them, avoid hitting them while trying to collect as many of the artifacts as possible.

So that's the essence of the actual game.

But, you know, we use some really nice textures in there.

There's some music at certain points There's a waterfall.

There's certain types of effects, falling rocks and and things like that.

And then the ride just kind of gets.

It just opens up and gets stranger and stranger.

The more time goes by until the end, you get a little bit of a exciting drop, sort of like a sort of like a conventional ride.

The experience really is a lot of fun.

I found it to be surprisingly soothing, but you better be strapped in tight when the inversions happen.

I mean, that drop I told you about.

Yep.

Here we go.

Yes, we use redundant restraints.

So you have a six point restraint harness.

You've got a lap bar that comes over you.

But, you know, we had to pass all of these inspections by the state to get our permit to operate and everything.

So and as we just overengineered the crap out of the ride by making it, you know, the steel tubes thicker than they probably should be and just trying to double up on everything and making sure that we don't we don't miss anything If you want to check out the Shuttle 39 RotoLoco, you can visit the Center for Alternate Reality in the Railroad Square Art District Friday through Sunday or visit them online at New World.

Rides dot com.

Coming to you from some alternate reality.

For WFSU Public Media I'm Mike Plummer.

All right Okay, we're back.

We're safe.

Thank God.

Before we brought you virtual reality adventures of space WFSU's Rob Diaz de Villegas brought us real world EcoAdventures in our local forest.

He's shown us up-close views of snakes and salamanders, as well as trips by water and by land.

One of the most interesting people Rob has ever included in his eco adventures is local biologist Dr. Bruce Means.

He's been a great and entertaining guide for Rob over the years.

Now look at this.

I look how far I can get in there.

I can go way down in there and really soft and go Oh, oh, I love to do that with groups!

[laughter] Let's reminisce a little more with Rob.

And Bruce is 2017.

Search for a special salamander in the Chipola River floodplain.

I've been studying salamanders in Florida for over 50 years.

I got my master's and PhD on Salamander Biology at FSU up in the panhandle.

You might well ask, well, what's the value of a salamander?

Any kind of creature or plant?

Wow.

Well, the value is not just in the plant itself, which has its own interesting story.

But the ecological relationships that plant or animal has with the ground, the geological environment it lives in, and the other plants and animals.

So ecology the larger story of the planet and how we live in it.

Oh, there's a has a lot to do with understanding how other plants and animals make their living in environments Over the decades, a Bruce means a studied snakes and salamanders in our area.

He's gotten to know our local ecosystems as well as anyone in this three part adventure.

We'll get to know three quintessential Florida wetland environments through three salamanders that are featured prominently in Dr. Means' research.

We start along the Chipola River, where we hope to find one of his newest discoveries Well, this is what science is all about.

Science is about being interested in something and studying it.

And in my case, it's something that not many people would do.

Get on your hands and knees in wet, mucky seepage, slowly tearing apart the leaf litter, looking for whatever they can find.

In my case, I found this new salamander in the stuff One of the places I dearly love is a swamp like this where you find muck.

Now, if you look upstream, you'll see the slope coming down and there's a kind of a little terrace that looks grassy, and then it drops into the swamp.

And a huge lake of water underlies the sand.

And there, wherever that sand and the aquifer underneath it are intercepted by a slope.

There is seepage.

Seepage water is extremely clean.

And no reason to go thirsty.

Here Potable water, all that the animals and the plants that live in this kind of seepage environment are extremely adapted to the buffered thermal regime of the water.

That seeps out of the slope.

And that's why these sphagnum bogs and all the little salamanders are uniquely adapted to this kind of habitat.

And only found in it.

Which brings us to this guy I started finding about 20 years ago, small salamanders we're going to see here in a minute that all looked alike.

But I thought we're likely to be different species.

A graduate student, Ken Ray at FSU, worked with me to discover that this one group of salamanders that was thought to be one species is actually at least five species.

And one of the new species is right here.

This species is named after a biologist.

It's called Eurycea Hillici Hillis' Dwarf Salamander.

Great looking, great thing.

I mean, Wolf, they get one.

They're not easy to find in the stagnant beds along the slope.

Most people are frightened of these big old spiders.

And it turns out they have very weak mouthparts.

She's the golden orb weaver that creates a web that has yellow gold, ash, color and is a very fine, strong line.

Dr. Means finds another salamander within the complex.

This is the eastern dwarf salamander with a silver builder.

The one we're looking for is going to orange building.

Now, that was interesting that we turn this one up.

So the other one is probably further up slope because that's where I found them before The Hillis dwarf salamander occupies a slightly drier environment than the silver bellied.

Now, the science recognizes them as separate species.

We can better begin to understand their ecological niches in our next adventures.

We learned two other salamanders living in two entirely different wetland environments, which also used to be considered a single species.

It's the story of Bruce Means' first discovery.

That's not the only salamander that Rob and Bruce have searched for over the years.

Check out this hunt for the Apalachicola dusky salamander in the Bradwell Bay wilderness.

We are in one of the remotest places in our area with Dr. Bruce Means.

It's time for salamander hunting in the swamps of the Bradwell Bay Wilderness.

This Ti Ti swamp is one of North Florida's, and the lower coastal plains mysterious and, I think, fabulous environments.

Most people don't like to be in a place like this because most people are afraid of swamps and dark water and bugs, which occasionally are in here It happens that there there's a salamander that lives in this kind of habitat.

I've been studying it for well over 50 years called a southern dusky salamander.

It's related to the Apalachicola dusky.

But until I got interested in their biology back 50 years ago, everyone thought they were all the same species.

And so slowly, over time, I've worked out their differences, their physical differences help them adapt to different types of wetland environments.

Whereas the Appalachian coal all lives in the headwater streams of steepheads and ravines that occur in the panhandle, which are very oxygenated and sort of tumbling little first order streams down here where it's swampy.

We're not high in elevation and there's not a lot of relief.

Then the water kind of opens up, but gently and slowly moves down gradient and forms deposits of peat with the leaf litter and twig litter and everything that's falling down from these depths Ti Ti and a few other associated plants.

And the water comes and goes, it dries out and it fills up depending on rain.

But the animals live at the edge of the water and when it's real drought, they get back up underneath.

This island of roots that you see all around here is very full of, you know, little holes and tunnels.

And the animal can burrow into that and stay moist and safe inside that environment when it dries out.

Anybody doing that will come out and be trying to get wriggle down into the heat.

With water as high as it is today, the southern dusky is hard to find.

There are other challenges to working in the swamp.

This is one of a approximately 15 species of delineations kind of plants called Smillax.

I like a calm frown ax.

If you're in a swamp or you're where this grows, you don't have to starve because right now is the best eating material right after growing.

Perfect.

Hmm.

You love it.

I Iove it.

It makes a great salad down to about there.

So if he ever wandering around like Mr. Tate did in Tate's hell swamp, there's plenty of food out here.

While they're physically hard to find.

Dr. Means knows from his sampling that they're still here.

That's not the case everywhere, though.

The Southern dusky salamander for some reason, unbeknownst to us, has disappeared from most of its habitats, like over 150 different sites where I had studied it for my doctorate and master's degree many, many years ago, back in the early seventies, late sixties, except right here in Bradwell Bay Wilderness area, this drainage called Monkey Creek, which is surrounded by the wilderness boundary, seems to have the last really extant and flourishing population of this animal.

Next, we travel to an entirely different type of wetland environment.

That means there's no trouble at all finding Apalachicola dusky salamanders.

Bruce has been doing his research on salamanders for quite some time now.

More than 50 years ago, he was the first to identify the Apalachicola dusky salamander.

Here's part three of that Salamander series we're standing at one of the places I most love in this world.

There is a big surprise right behind me.

You can't tell it standing here.

What you see is a line of old trees.

And then beyond it, it looks like flat ground.

Well, come with me.

We are in an off-limits.

Part of teresa state park here.

We're searching for salamanders in a uniquely Floridian environment.

This is one of Florida's great natural treasures and one that most Floridians don't know about.

It's called a steep head.

And to understand what is steep, it is all about.

We have to go down into it.

This is a 45 degree angle slope.

And the sand that I'm sliding down on with leaf litter on top of it is at its angle of repose any steeper.

And it'll slide There's an underground lake back there where the slope intercepts.

It leaks out and carries with it sand grain at a time that little creek is carrying this material away with it downstream.

This is fast enough that over 50 years this little part of the steep it has migrated you know goodness to that about 20 feet There are so many wonderful things about steep hills.

We can't recount all of them but because they're steep sloped and they're difficult to get into.

They weren't heavily logged.

They tell an ecological story of wonderful significance.

There are many planted animal species that are only found in the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines region.

There's something here that is really one of my favorite stories.

If you grab a leaf and crush it, it's got a really powerful, pungent odor and it's only found rooted in this kind of seepage in ravines in the panhandle.

It is one of the oldest angiosperms, meaning flowering plants in the world.

This is called star anise.

Right there you get up.

This is a girl later because of her size of her head.

Males have a really big head with big jowls.

They fight.

I found him in the 1960s and named him in 1972.

This is the Apalachicola dusky salamander without much effort.

Dr. Means turns up a few more.

This.

This should be a girl.

And he's lost his tail.

Something bitten off and he's regenerating and see the little new piece of tail him.

Come on the tail shape up.

Dr. Means determine that the Apalachicola dusky salamander was a separate species from the southern dusky.

One of the characteristics of this salamander.

It has a really long treat filamentous tail.

When we go look at their relative, the one that's decline, the southern dusky salamander, you'll find out they have a very deep blade shaped tail, which is one of the differences between them.

Another difference is hard to see when those salamanders are covered in muck.

Although the salamander looks dark against light leaves, she'll lighten up and you'll see a beautiful little pattern of blotches on her back.

You can turn oh, there's eggs, salamander eggs, and you can see a little baby salamanders in the eggs.

Can you see the salamanders?

I was the first biologist to study animals in the steepheads.

No biologists knew what a steep head was until I started studying the salamanders in steepheads and writing papers about them and realizing biologically and geologically how unique steep hills were.

Steep heads were essentially not in the scientific literature.

And what's really cool about steepheads is they are so unique and so found only in Florida, North Florida, especially Panhandle Florida, that the only other place in the universe that they've been found is on Mars from steep head ravines to see which slopes in dark and mysterious swamps.

Bruce Means has shown us that one of the best ways to get to know North Florida wetlands is to get down and dirty and go salamander hunting for WFSU, I'm Rob Diaz de Villegas.

Now there's a reason we've been revisiting these fun Salamander Eco Adventures with Dr. Means.

He's featured in a brand new cover story for National Geographic as well as a documentary.

It's on the topic of the South American to Tepuis which is a kind of mountain.

WFSU's Rob Diaz de Villegas sat down with Dr. Means to talk about the project, as well as the role biodiversity plays locally and in the world.

You can see the story next week on Local Routes.

But first, here's a preview.

I'm an ecologist.

I was trained here in North Florida at FSU, and it turns out that ecologists and other biologists are generally, you know, knowledgeable about the temperate part of the world in which they were trained.

But a real field ecologist ought to have some understanding about processes in the tropics, because the world has had tropical zones around the equator almost for its entire extent.

And I eventually became familiar enough with the biology of the area that I could write grant proposals.

And then I got involved with National Geographic, which funded some of my expeditions and did some documentaries, culminating in the last one, which I just completed.

And it may be my swan song of deeply exploration because I'm 81 years old.

You can learn more about salamanders, Bruce Means and many, many other things about our local ecology by heading to WFSU dot org slash ecology blog.

That's it for this episode of Local Roots.

I'm Suzanne Smith.

You can see these stories and more on our website, WFSU.org/Local Routes.

And while you're online, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Plus, sign up for our Community Calendar newsletter delivered weekly to your email.

It's a great way to stay on top of events happening locally and in the virtual world.

For everyone at WFSU Public Media.

Thanks for watching.

See you next week, everyone.

Magnolia Tree greet the southern breeze.

In the land were rivers wind.

Seeds that spring up from the past, leave us treasures yet to find.

Where our children play along the land our fathers built with honest hands.

Take the moment now and look around the paradise we have found.

Take the local routes and journey down the roads we call our home