Follow TV Tropes

Following

Artificial Outdoors Display

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/banjo_nuttyacres.png
Come with me, and we'll be
In a world of artificial nature... ♫

"Home" consisted of a room on a subsurface level of a huge apartment building. Once, the Jiffi-View Company of greater Cleveland came by every six months and created a 3D projection, animated, of a view of Carmel, California. This "view" filled his room's "window," or ersatz window. However, of late, due to his bad financial situation he had given up trying to imagine that he lived on a great hill with a view of the sea and towering redwoods; he had become content — or rather resigned — to face blank, inert black glass.
Galactic Pot-Healer, by Philip K. Dick.

This trope is where a sufficiently large interior of a building has an artificial "outdoors" area to it; commonly (but by no means always) comes with plants, animals, as well as imagery of clouds and sun.

This can be accomplished by varying means; using holograms is the most common choice (either technological or magical), although something as mundane as decorating the ceiling and walls with outdoor imagery also counts here.

Sometimes may involve City in a Bottle or Domed Hometown, in which case this illusion may or may not be a privilege for a certain class of people. The common plot involving such a setting can be either the governor of said place deceiving its denizens with faked scenery while hiding the real one (which is usually worse) to the common public, or when said denizens willingly put a more beautiful imagery over the worse real atmosphere (this one can happen in regular buildings as well). It may even be part of a Lotus-Eater Machine or Pocket Dimension.

Sometimes this will be a part of a Virtual Training Simulation; creating artificial scenery for a training stage is a common feature. May overlap with Not So Remote if either the audience or the characters aren't aware the display is artificial. May be part of a Fake Town.

Compare Weather-Control Machine or Weather Manipulation, where the weather is real but is artificially made. See also Skybox, which is essentially a non-in-universe version of this used in nearly all video games.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • Armitage III. Ross Sylibus is apparently looking at the blue skies of Earth, but then hits a button to reveal it was just a ceiling projection, and he's in a small grungy room on Mars.
  • Bleach:
    • Urahara has a habit of creating huge, elaborate, secret underground training rooms. The ground often has the look of rocky, mountainous terrain and the ceiling appears to be sunny, blue skies. When Ichigo comments on it, Urahara explains that he feels the airy, outdoor atmosphere makes for a better feeling when underground. Ichigo cynically retorts that's the sort of thing a gaoler would say. Hundreds of chapters later, it's confirmed that, until a century ago, Urahara did actually have a gaoler's job.
    • When Aizen took control of Las Noches, he had the huge interior arena converted to look like the outdoors. The ground is covered in sand and the ceiling looks like blue sky with the entire area lit by sunlight. Outside the building, Hueco Mundo exists in constant, moonlit darkness. The Espada believe, with due cause, that Aizen has set the area up so that everything the 'sunlight' touches is under his technological surveillance.
  • An episode of Appleseed XIII features a hotel with an internal atrium that has a park on the floor while the surrounding walls and ceiling are covered by a holographic projection of the sky.
  • Dallos is set in a lunar colony that's mostly underground or in a dome, but the cities have a simulated blue sky.
  • In Dragon Ball, the fourth floor of the Red Ribbon Army's Muscle Tower where Goku fights Ninja Murasaki is made to look like a traditional Japanese garden. It has grass, trees, a stream stocked with piranhas, and a small house.
  • In Dragon Ball Z: Bojack Unbound Gohan fights Bojack and his henchmen in what looks like an abandoned old European-esque city. Then Piccolo comes through a hole in the cloudy sky, revealing that the city is inside a dome on the Battle Island with the interior painted to look like a sky.
  • Used for a Bait-and-Switch ending in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Batou and the Major have apparently gone on leave together to a sun-lit beach, only to reveal they're lying under a holographic projection at Section 9's headquarters. Aramaki appears to tell them to get back to work, and they turn it off to reveal it's raining outside.
  • In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders, Dio's mansion has a tropic island in the lower floors, and a MC Escher-esque main room. Both of these are artificial illusions created by Stand abilities.
  • Megazone 23 is set onboard a massive colony ship whose inhabitants believe themselves to be living in 1980s Japan has a fairly normal looking sky in the backgrounds.
  • In One Piece, Crocus the doctor decorates the giant whale Laboon's inside with paintings of the sky. How it seems to be just as bright as a sunny day is not explained however.
  • Overlord (2012): One of the rooms in Nazarick mimics the night sky of Earth... or rather, the night sky of earth before it was polluted in the Crapsack World of Overlord, the creation of the guild member named Blue Planet.
  • Patema Inverted takes place after a disastrous experiment reversed the gravitic polarity of certain people. Age and his people live on the surface, while Patema and other "inverted" must live underground. Or maybe not. The Reveal begins as Age and Patema discover that the "sky" over his homeland is an artifical dome.
  • 7 Seeds has the underground Ryugu Shelter have multiple screens that display an outside environment, which also changes to simulate weather and changing seasons.

    Arts 
  • Landscape paintings, whether of natural or urban outdoor scenes.
    • Plus points if they're murals painted directly onto walls, as any number of skies painted on ceilings (including perhaps the Sistine Chapel ceiling, though any outdoors there are secondary to the Biblical figures depicted in them) can attest.

    Comic Books 
  • The Danger Room in X-Men serves this purpose to the titular team. The room can project holograms of many kinds of places, and later stories makes it more advanced by it literally morphing its structure to closely fit the actual scenery.
  • In Kingdom Come, Superman owns a massive room meant to look like a farm in Kansas, where he spends his days tending to the crops and animals. Wonder Woman stops on by and knocks out the holographic displays to reveal the dark metal walls on all sides. Understandably, the animals freak out. The real Kansas was rendered uninhabitable after an accident with a nuclear-powered villain, and Superman runs the artificial farm to take his mind off of recent depressing events. Wonder Woman turns off the holograms partially to try to get Superman to stop running from reality, as Superman's farm therapy isn't helping him recover and is in fact worsening his depression.

    Comic Strips 
  • Foxtrot. During the Fun-Fun Caribbeanny Resort arc (Roger takes the family to a tropical resort a thousand miles from the ocean), one of the kids swims too far out and smacks into the fake backdrop. In another strip we see Roger and Andy looking out the window of their room at the sunset together... before it's replaced with a "Please swipe credit card to continue". It's a room with a pay-per-view.

    Fanworks 

    Films — Animation 
  • Patema Inverted: About 2/3 into the film, Patema and Eiji get swallowed up into the sky, seemingly to their deaths. It's only then that they realize that the "sky" is really the underside of an abandoned facility. It illuminates during the night, while they're stranded there, revealing that the "stars" had only been lights.
  • This is part of the Crapsaccharine World in The Lorax (2012). Thneedville run by O'Hare looks lush and clean... but then you see that the "trees" are all fakes, the "grass-filled ground" conceals actual soil beneath it, O'Hare selling air to the citizens, and most of all, the bright blue sky is just a painting on a giant wall. Which Ted, the hero of the story, later breaks, to reveal to the other citizens the real world out there: a desolate ground with gray cloudy sky with no signs of life in sight.
  • The Axiom on WALL•E, which has a large open area on the Lido Deck that simulates day and night cycles, with the sun and the moon bearing BnL logos.
  • The windows of the original Benbow Inn from Disney's Treasure Planet can display colorful flowers and chirping birds to mask the cold, colorless exterior. Sarah Hawkins is shown adjusting a control knob to achieve this effect.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • The titular Elysium space station contains an idyllic living environment, with open air, trees, lakes and sunshine, for the elite of the world's population.
  • The enormous soundstage that houses The Truman Show is naturally designed to resemble an outside area, since its titular subject isn't meant to know he's inside an enormous soundstage. The exact details are never given, but the sun and stars are powerful stage lights, as shown when Sirius 6 falls down at one point.
  • In the extended version of Aliens, we see Ripley looking out at a forest of twittering birds. When Burke walks in the scenery changes back into a hospital wall in the Space Station she's on. In the novelization this 'solido' is realistic enough to fool her cat Jones into stalking the birds.
  • Vicker's suite aboard the Prometheus has holographic displays showing scenes like snowy forests or grassy fields in a Call-Forward to the Aliens film.
  • The colony in The Island (2005) has one projecting a scene of a mountain to the inhabitants, masking its true purpose. Lincoln Six Echo disables it at the end to reveal the truth to them.
  • Back to the Future Part II. In 2015, the McFly home has a window with a view of a pleasant sunny meadow. It turns out that the view is artificial, and is projected onto a venetian blind which is pulled down over the real glass window in order to hide the view of the urban sprawl.
  • Resident Evil (2002). In the Elaborate Underground Base The Hive, one room has a window which displays the sights and sounds of a big city.
    Matt: Makes it easier to work underground, thinking there's a view.
  • The space crew in Sunshine finds relaxation and comfort on their long way towards the sun by using personalized 3D holodeck programs which place them in a forest or other familiar environments.
  • Capitol residences in The Hunger Games movies sometimes have windows that can display live feeds of various outdoor scenes. In the tribute training centre dorms, Katniss herself switches to a feed of the woods, which of course remind her of home.
  • Independence Day: Resurgence: The interior of the Harvester mothership contains an entire ecosystem, including an atmosphere and plant life. Justified, as the mothership is larger than the moon itself, and must be able to support the Harvesters' civilization.
  • George Lucas wrote and directed THX 1138 in 1971 about a regimented dystopia. Renegades and criminals are sent to a bivouac, with supplies coming from below the floor. Almost nobody tried to leave the site, because a neurosuppressant in their food supply limited their field of vision: everything beyond an arbitrary distance appeared as white nothingness. The title character is able to escape this prison simply by walking far enough into this "nothingness."
  • Jumanji: As the game continues, it effectively turns the Parrish Mansion into a self-contained jungle world. Worse, the wildlife that doesn't stay in the mansion and causes havoc in the town itself.
  • Found aboard Cooper Station on Interstellar, where most of the interior is devoted to fields of crops. When Coop wakes up after decades in the singularity he at first thinks he's back on Earth, especially after seeing a bunch of kids outside playing baseball. Then he notices the ground curving up.
  • Tomorrowland has a means of seeing any location on Earth in a full 3D display.
  • The interior of Newt's Bag of Holding in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them contains several partitions enchanted to resemble the natural habitats of various creatures in his keeping.
  • Played with in Outland. The head of the mining colony has a computerized golf range in his office, and tees off against a video screen which shows where his virtual ball ends up.
  • Valerian's first scene in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets shows him sunbathing in a large room in a spaceship CG'ed up to look like a beach.
  • The second deadly chamber in Escape Room (2019) is dressed up to look like a coniferous forest in winter, complete with trees and an iced-over pond. Played with in that the entrance to this "outdoor" area is dressed up to look like a rustic cabin, simulating an indoor environment within an Artificial Outdoors Display, enclosed inside an entirely different building.
  • Escape Room: Tournament of Champions repeats this several times, with the third room looking like an expansive beach until the players use a polaroid camera to take a picture of the horizon, at which point the illusion fades and they can see the ocean and sky are clearly painted on the walls. The fourth room is deliberately made to look like a busy downtown city street to make the players think they escaped, but the background is actually just a hologram.
  • In the beginning of Godzilla vs. Kong, Kong is shown living on Skull Island on a sunny day, but he knows something's not right. He creates a javelin out of a tree and hurls it into the sky, smashing off a chunk of it, revealing the entire sky and the distant mountains are just digital projections on the inner roofs and walls of an immense containment dome. Outside the dome, Skull Island had been rendered uninhabitable when the Perpetual Storm surrounding the island suddenly closed in.
  • For most of the story in Sex Mission both we and the protagonists think the underground city they're in is necessary due to the Polluted Wasteland the Earth's become. Actually, the view from the outside cameras is a painted canvas backdrop and the Earth is just fine outside.

    Literature 
  • Prelude to Foundation: Hari Seldon goes to an indoor park on Trantor. Most native Trantorans don't go to the parks — being that close to nature freaks them out — but it's an amenity for off-worlders, who didn't grow up in a domed planet-wide city.
  • Kur of Gor takes place almost entirely on a Kur "steel world" where they have wildernesses on the spaceships to simulate the world they left behind and the one they hope one day to live on. They also have artificial weather (sun, rain, thunderstorms, snow, etc.).
  • Ray Bradbury's short story "The Veldt": In a house of the future, the children's bedroom has virtual reality capability. It can project on its walls, ceiling and floor a simulation of an outdoor setting. The setting the children like most is an African veldt, complete with predatory animals capable of killing people.
  • The Gaming Domes of Dream Park are massive, fully enclosed stage sets where any conceivable type of terrain can be simulated for the Park's signature adventure scenarios.
  • In Harry Potter and its film adaptations, in almost every banquet scene at the Hogwarts' Great Hall, there's a special effect on the ceiling; sometimes it's falling snow, sometimes it's falling autumn leaves, and so on. It is enchanted to always correspond with the weather outside.
    • The (underground) Ministry of Magic's building has enchanted windows that look out on nice scenery. Arthur Weasley says they had two weeks of hurricanes when the maintenance people were trying to get a raise.
  • In Hollow Places, the ground of the Nine-Eyed Fish's inner sanctum changes from grass, to snow, to sand, transforming each time an observer takes notice of what's under their feet.
  • The Hunger Games' Arena. The Capitol may manipulate the landscape into whatever they wish for each Game, be it a desert, frozen wasteland, rainforest, et cetera, et cetera.
  • The Last Wish. The wizard Stregobor, who specializes in illusions has conjured a sunny field inside of his stone tower.
  • Played with in Light of Other Days. A material called "slow glass" is technically transparent but so dense that light takes weeks, months, or even years to pass through it. As a result, images on it can be preserved by placing the slow glass near a scenic area for a while then hoisting it elsewhere. With it, one can have the appearance of a window to a grassy meadow or mountain range or other site right outside one's room.
  • In The Heroes of Olympus, the Argo II dining room's walls are enchanted screens that show the heroes scenes of Camp Half-Blood. Once the screens are hacked by the Kerkopes and later, war comes to the camp, the scenes are far from cheering.
  • In Robert A. Heinlein's Space Cadet, Hayworth Hall at the academy has an enormous rotunda, with a midnight black ceiling with artificial stars in the actual constellations of the night sky, so that "the illusion of being outdoors at night was most persuasive". The illusion is further enhanced by the floor being a pit with a "bed of rock and sand", in which rests a crash-landed spaceship. (Another cadet does point out the Kilroy Was Here didn't actually crash land at this spot; the remains of the ship were relocated for the display.)
  • In the Gentleman Bastard series, the Bondsmages hold court in an underground chamber with a large glass dome that's enchanted to mimic the sky. It serves as an Empathic Environment of sorts when someone is presenting a case, becoming brighter and sunnier as the Assembly comes to agree with their argument.
  • Dreadnought! features what appears to be a precursor to holodeck technology, in the form of a projector that fills a room with a realistic holographic depiction of a world's environment, but without the interactive ability. At one point, Piper uses it to transform a shuttle bay into Vulcan to give Sarda a more welcoming environment for his studies.
  • The Glade in The Maze Runner seems to be a vast outdoor courtyard surrounded by high walls, beyond which lies the Maze from which the characters are trying to escape. The only indication that things may not be quite what they seem is the fact that the weather never changes from one day to the next. In fact, the Glade was built in an enormous underground cavern, with the "sky" and "sun" being holograms created to give the illusion of an outdoor space.
  • In the novelization of 2001: A Space Odyssey, private quarters on the Moon include a version of this with a limited number of views. It's mentioned that there was a reluctance to spend money on such luxuries until the people in charge of their budget were convinced that it was necessary for morale when you can't step outside to look at the greenery.
  • In the Revenger trilogy, most worlds (which are actually huge space stations built by breaking down all the planets in the solar system for parts) have decorative ceiling panels, either the blue with white dappling of Old Earth's sky, or the colour of the atmosphere on the other lost planets. One of the signs that Strizzardy is a Wretched Hive is that many of these panels are missing.
  • Doctor Who Expanded Universe:
    • In the Eighth Doctor Adventures, the TARDIS has a "butterfly room", which is a meadow under a blue sky, filled with butterflies.
    • The short story "uPVC" by Paul Farnsworth, in More Short Trips, has the TARDIS somehow intercepted by an intergalactic double-glazing salesman, who sells windows with "your choice of view". The Doctor gets one showing a Gallifreyan landscape, but many years (and several incarnations) later, can no longer bear to look at it.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Come Back Mrs. Noah. The living quarters of the Britannia Seven are a Normal Earth Life Imitation Environment (N.E.L.I.E.). The Captain and his Number Two get the luxury quarters with a window facing the Earth, while the others have to make do with a projected image that needs a coin inserted to work. There's also a holodeck that turns the boiler room into the golf course at St Andrews (it even has simulated rain which causes it to fuse out).
  • Babylon 5 has large areas for such purposes. Part of it is orchards for growing food, but other parts are parks, including one with a hedge maze, a Zen garden, baseball diamond, and Fresh Air, the finest restaurant on the station.
  • Cloud 9 on Battlestar Galactica (2003), which has a large park as its main appeal, which resulted in it being the setting of many receptions and parties...until it got nuked.
  • In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. an underground bunker is shown to have an artificial window that shows an outside scene which changes periodically, to give the impression of not being buried deep underground.
    • Another example occurs in season 5. Deke Shaw's unfamiliarity with the outdoors combined with the effects of the Fear Dimension creates an entire underground forest on one of the levels of the Lighthouse. Fortunately, Deke gets over his fears at the end of the episode, and the forest is even used as the location of the FitzSimmons wedding.
  • Get Smart. The Chief's underground office has an obviously fake window showing the Washington DC skyline which actually hides a wall safe.
  • Doctor Who:
    • In the episode "Flesh and Stone", the Doctor and his group are on a spaceship with a large forest-like arboretum, which is mostly used to create breathable air for the humans on board but can also be used like a park.
    • In "The Invasion of Time", the TARDIS includes a garden that appears to have natural sunlight (and even a sundial).
  • Star Trek:
    • Star Trek: The Original Series. The asteroid ship Yonada has a hollow interior made to look like a sky. One of the inhabitants actually climbs a mountain high enough to feel the roof, giving the episode its name, "For the World is Hollow, and I Have Touched the Sky."
    • The holodecks were introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation, a room with a series of holoprojectors and replicators that can create just about any environment or setting. The pilot episode shows Cmdr. Riker entering a holodeck simulation of a forest, crossing a stream, climbing a tree...
    • Frequent mention was also made of an arboretum aboard the Enterprise-D, but it was sadly never seen on-screen.
    • Holodecks became of utmost importance on Star Trek: Voyager when Voyager was travelling through the void. The holodeck was the only place where the crew didn't have to stare out at an infinite black expanse without even any stars.
  • Power Rangers has done this twice, specifically Power Rangers Lost Galaxy and Power Rangers RPM. The main setting of both series is a human-populated city enclosed within a massive dome which projects a sunny blue sky to the population. The contexts are different, with the former being a space colony cruising through the galaxy and the latter to protect the city from the post-apocalyptic nightmare the world has now become. However, in both cases, the reasoning does make sense when you think about it; when you're trapped in an enclosed environment in hostile territory and your future is uncertain, it's important to keep up morale. Of course, the real out-of-universe reason why is because the show needs a blue sky to match up with the Super Sentai footage.
  • In the fourth season of Arrow, Thea Queen wakes up in a suburban house with no memory of how she got there. Gradually she beings to realise there's something wrong—there's no sign of other people or cars, the sun is always shining regardless of the time of day, and the nature sounds are on a continuous loop. When she tries to flee, she runs into a Beehive Barrier on which this trope is being projected. Turns out she's in an underground Domed City constructed by HIVE so they can survive the nuclear apocalypse they're planning to bring about.
  • Imagination Movers: Several rooms of the Idea Warehouse simulate outdoor environments, from the jungle to the beach to the moon itself. There's even a room that contains an entire sky!
  • The occasional episode of Monster House (no, not the movie) would do this. The show has a group of builders give a makeover to someone's house and some episodes have them recreating an outdoor scene.
  • Ascension (Miniseries): Seen on the upper decks of the Ascension, which look more like a series of open-air structures and apparently has one area made up like a beach. The lower decks are much more utilitarian and practical-looking.
  • The Black Mirror episode "15 Million Merits" features one of these at the end, to underline how the protagonist just went from one caged existence to another one, that is just more expensive, but not any different.
  • The Orville: The heart of the colony ship is an enormous open area made to look like a fertile valley. The sky has a series of lights that illuminate it constantly, though there was supposed to be a night cycle as well. Captain Mercer eventually finds the way to open the main viewing port, causing the first night in thousands of years and showing the inhabitants exactly where they are.
  • Altered Carbon. The hotel room Kovacs is killed in during the Action Prologue has one set to a beach at sunset. He ends up turning it off to look out at the dark and stormy cityscape with twin moons, shortly before a well-armed police unit does an explosive entry.
  • The Expanse
    • There's a fake blue cloudy sky over the habitation area of Ceres Station, which is actually on an airless asteroid.
    • Used for a Bait-and-Switch in the first episode. An officer on a spaceship goes stir-crazy and appears to shoot out the window, but it's just a computer screen so no-one dies.
  • Inverted in The Silent Sea where the dorm rooms have a window onto the surface of the Moon that doubles as a computer monitor.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Dungeons & Dragons
    • Module D3 Vault of the Drow. Area R247 appears to be an outdoors setting at night, including a starry sky with a moon. It has small trees, shrubs, bushes and beautiful flowers, with small birds being heard in the foliage. Most of this is a permanent illusion: the birds are actually 100 bats and rats.
    • Module T1-4 The Temple of Elemental Evil. The interior of one room appears to be outdoors, with a blue sky and hot sun overhead. There appear to be foxes, jackals and giant rats in the area. All of this (except the jackals) is created by a Permanent Illusion spell.
  • Pathfinder: In the Iron Gods adventure path, the party explores an underground ruin which suddenly opens up into a vast desert under a dark, starless sky. It's not too hard to figure out that it's a wrecked spaceship, and this was once some kind of terrarium-like habitat. Getting the environmental controls running again is the key to putting the area's inhabitants' undead remains to rest, when they see their "sun" rise once more. Similar habitats are encountered later on, including a Lost World jungle biome complete with dinosaur-riding villagers.

    Video Games 
  • ANNO: Mutationem: Ann's room at her apartment in Skopp City has a setting to turn on a display for the window into showing a clear night sky.
  • Control: Many rooms in the Oldest House have skylights in the ceiling with what seems to be sunlight pouring in, but this is impossible considering the layout and design of the building. There's even a warning in one section that seeing an actual window to the outside is reason to panic, though it doesn't explain why.
  • Death Stranding: Sam Porter Bridges finds his mother, the President of what's left of the United States, dying in a hospital bed set up inside a sunlit Oval Office in Capital Knot City. However after she's declared dead the surroundings change to reveal they're actually in a windowless isolation ward.
    • The firing range added in the Director's Cut is situated in an artificially lit chamber that can reconfigure itself for the various training drills you can take part in.
  • Deathless Hyperion is set in a space station infested with monsters; one particularly wide area have the ceilings displaying the scenery of outer space, allowing you a clear view of Saturn while shooting away at enemies.
  • The Presidium of the Citadel Station in Mass Effect. It's set up like a large park, with trees and lakes running throughout, in contrast to the wards which are strictly technological.
  • BioShock's Arcadia even attempts to paint a sky on its ceiling in one part.
    • An unused concept for BioShock 2, shown in the Deco Devolution artbook, shows the ceiling of Pauper's Drop covered with sheets painted up to look like a cloud-filled sky.
  • Gage Blackwood's Hi-Rez 4D Environ System can do this in the first two games of The Journeyman Project. It's capable of projecting pictures of various scenes onto every wall, mixing them to music, and in the second game, doubling as an In-Game TV.
  • Mega Man:
    • Mega Man 8: In Astro Man's stage, during the boss fight with him, the room you're in projects an imagery of moon surface. The projection stops after he's defeated. It is implied that the stage's backgrounds are all artificial as well.
    • In Mega Man ZX Advent, Albert's lair in the sky, Ouroboros, somehow has a blue sky and a flower field inside his throne room. After the first-phase boss fight against him, he transforms with Model W and the atmosphere shatters, revealing a windy sunset sky (the actual atmosphere).
  • In Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, all of the game worlds LOG creates have an artificial aesthetic. Nutty Acres in particular is surrounded by television screens projecting a blue sky.
  • In Kirby Super Star, in the sub-game Great Cave Offensive, the titular underground cave is big enough to have a lake, a forest, a giant tower and a garden. But the actual trope comes out in the blue cloudy sky that appears in said garden area.
  • In the Halo games made by 343 Industries, the multiplayer maps are in-universe simulations, indicating that the post-war UNSC's holographic technology is now advanced enough to simulate a outdoors environment.
  • In Aperture Tag: The Paint Gun Testing Initiative, an officially approved fan-made Game Mod for Portal 2, there are several test chambers set in what are obviously normal rooms painted to look like various outdoor locations.
  • An early opening cutscene for Portal 2 depicts an island in the middle of the ocean, before the reveal shows it's just another room in Aperture Laboratories.
  • Command & Conquer: Renegade's single player campaign has you journey into Nod buildings to more effectively destroy them via the master control terminal. Hand of Nod buildings later in the game have an artificial outdoor environment presumably used for training Nod soldiers.
  • The Star Trek Online Foundry mission "A Taste of Collateral Damage" features a large asteroid with habitation domes built into it. The domes have a planetary blue-sky-and-clouds holographically projected onto the ceiling, because, as the author put it:
    BorrowedTune: If you were forced to live in an orbiting geodesic dome, would you prefer to look at a grid and black space or a beautiful blue sky?
  • Metroid: Other M has hologram generators that help mask the fact that all of the rooms are in a space station. Finding and deactivating them is needed to reach the exit of the room.
  • In F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, the hospital where Becket wakes up after being given his Second Hour Super Power turns out to have this; it's an underground complex with a holographic skyline outside the "windows".
  • Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance has a large room decorated like a small Japanese town. Inside a high-rise building. They even put a large cherry tree by a pool, something Armstong does not approve of in the opening of the Jetstream Sam DLC.
  • In Overwatch, some of the interior walls of the spawn rooms on the Ecopoint: Antarctica map are projections of a tropical paradise, contrasting the ice cold environment outside.
  • In Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, the Age of Ahnonay appears to be outdoors, but is actually the interior of a huge machine.
  • In Prey (2017), the moment you swing your wrench, you learned first-hand that the whole prologue, including the whole city of San Francisco in view, are actually three-dimensional "Looking Glass" screens designed to simulate it, and you're in a space station for the whole time.
  • Horizon Forbidden West: GAIA's chamber dome can use data from recon drones to recreate a 360 degree panorama of the areas surveyed.
  • Splatoon: While Inklings live above ground in the bright and colorful city of Inkopolis, their enemies, the Octarians, have been reduced to living in large underground domes following their loss in the Great Turf War. Accessed via a network of kettles, each dome has various artificial skies and landscapes haphazardly constructed in the background. According to The Art of Splatoon, these domes were actually built by humans prior to their extinction due to rising sea levels.
  • Stray has two examples:
    • The "night sky" on the city the cat spends the majority of the game within is actually the roof of a giant dome enclosing it from the Outside, with the "stars" being holes of small light.
    • Later, in the Jail, you can find glitched displays of simulated blue sky hanging above you.
  • Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker features Labyrinthos, a Sharlayan research facility built inside a massive cavern. The ceiling is made of panels that display the sky and changes based on the time of day. The Sharlayans even produce artificial weather conditions like rain and fog. A sidequest chain in the area deals with diagnosing a problem with the artificial sun before it melts down.
  • ULTRAKILL: Limbo is artificial to the point of being maddening to its denizens. All the beautiful vistas are screens lining walls, the birdsong and wind come from speakers, everything is a clear manufacture of Heaven seemingly made to torment those within it with the idea they'll never reach a true Paradise.
  • Pokémon Scarlet and Violet: The Terarium, the main location of the Indigo Disk DLC, is an underwater habitat for wild Pokemon. There are four biomes based on different climatesnote  which are individually regulated. You are allowed to catch Pokemon, and there are even rewards for doing so.

    Webcomics 
  • The dome of the underground cavern over Orthorbbae in Drowtales has this, as does the Sullisin'rune dome. It's suggested that the Dark Elves made them to simulate the surface world after the loss of their homelands due to the war that ended the last age.
  • Hydroponic rooms in Gunnerkrigg Court have a bright blue sky.
  • Sleepless Domain: It's implied that the Great Barrier simulates an artificial sky, while hiding whatever may or may not be on the other side. An anonymous journal entry comments on the bizarre yet seemingly regular occurrences like rain with no clouds.

    Western Animation 
  • In one episode of Invader Zim, when the Earth is stolen by the Planetjackers, they encase the planet in a giant dome, the inside of which is a giant television screen generating an artificial sky so no one notices.
  • At the conclusion of the Loonatics Unleashed episode "The Menace of Mastermind", the Loonatics headquarters was left without electric power. However, the Loonatics were able to enjoy a simulated tropical vacation in their holographic training room, powered by Rev Runner on an exercise bike that runs a portable generator. The simulation dissolves when Rev stops for a rest break, and restores when Rev resumes pedaling.
  • Phineas and Ferb: In the episode "The Great Indoors", Phineas and Ferb construct a biodome that can simulate any environment, including a desert, a rainforest and a mountain.
  • Star Wars Resistance: At the end of "Hunt on Celsor 3", Neeku builds one for the Colossus, to alleviate the stress of being trapped inside a space station that no longer has any natural blue skies.
  • Corrupt Corporate Executive Shere Khan from Disney Television's TaleSpin maintains an elaborate arboretum on both sides of his office, very lush and verdant. It's large enough that when Rebecca comes to confront him about rising fuel prices, she first asks for some water. "It's a long walk across your office." Khan seems comfortable amid his greenery.

    Real Life 
  • Caesars Palace in Las Vegas has a real life version, also the Mexican pavilion in Epcot.
  • Modern flatscreen TVs can be large enough to rival typical house windows, and smart ones often come with default screensavers of beautiful images, including nature scenery. Ditto for large enough computer monitors.
    • For that matter, any projected outdoor image or footage counts. Apart from paintings this is Older Than Radio: projectors can depict outdoor scenes on still frames or film reels in a size large enough to cover a big part of a wall, the better for large audiences.
  • Planetaria are Real Life examples of this trope, where night skies are projected onto domed ceilings. Spaceship Earth features one at the very top, as well.
  • Many zoos are moving in this direction, particularly with animals that require specialized environments.
    • A polar exhibit will be a climate controlled room, made to look like ice floes, and the lighting determined by the time of year, darkened during winter months (which may be summer for northern zoos with an Antarctic display) and light during the summer.
    • A rainforest exhibit will feature lots of trees from around there and will be kept warm and steamy, with possible rain showers as well.
    • Exhibits devoted to nocturnal animals will clock-shift their lighting conditions to ensure the animals on display remain active when visitors are around to watch them. Often, recordings of ambient nocturnal sounds (crickets, owls, etc.) will be played to reinforce visitors' impression that it's nighttime and out-of-doors.
    • Wetland exhibits' pathways for visitors sometimes use slightly-yielding foam-matting or rubber flooring underfoot, to convey the tactile impression of soft sodden ground.
  • The Stampede 66 restaurant in Dallas, Texas features a large artificial tree with artificial night sky above in a take on a terrarium.
  • Disney Theme Parks:
    • Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland, for example, has its queue area inside a building and styled such that it resembles a nighttime bayou complete with shooting stars and fireflies, and most of the ride is a mock-up of a colonial town during a pirate attack, which is entirely underground.
    • The Pirates ride in Tokyo Disney has a restaurant in the bayou section, which feels like it's outdoors at night.
    • The last part of the Haunted Mansion is a graveyard full of ghosts and animates statues (explicitly set outside, since the ride vehicle enters that area through the attic window of the titular mansion) but is also entirely underground and therefore indoors.
    • Sinbad's Storybook Voyage in Tokyo Disney Sea can be described as a surprising mashup between Pirates and It's A Small World. It features a high-seas adventure story, told with superdeforme-size puppets, but with a surprisingly intricate level of detail. Some scenes, like the second room with the storm, really amaze with the outdoor effect, and the effect of scale.
    • It's A Small World can also count as this, depending on how one takes the style aspect.
    • Inverted at the Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser. The experience is meant to invoke an intergalactic cruise ship going through space and the ship has an "Climate Simulator" aboard the Halcyon that mimics the weather on the nearby planet of Batuu. In Real Life it is a legitimate outdoor area that guests can go to for some fresh air.
  • Atmospheric theatres are often built to resemble a courtyard or other outdoor location.
  • Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta features a walkway between concourses designed to look like a rainforest, which includes simulated raindrops projected onto the floor.

 
Feedback

Video Example(s):

Top

Evil Morty's Home

Evil Morty's space station consists of a large mansion built on a lush grassy yard complete with swimming pool and robot butlers. The space station is attached to the side of the Central Finite Curve for stability and ease of access, while there's a powerful barrier keeping the chaos of the void out that can have an idyllic landscape projected on it.

How well does it match the trope?

4.7 (10 votes)

Example of:

Main / SpaceStation

Media sources:

Report