The film (and ride) was shut down in 2004 (as well as the sister attraction, the IMAX Theater) when MGM Grand Resorts bought out the Luxor Hotel & Casino. The Interior of the Disney-esque ride, including all of the major set pieces were donated to the Children's Museum of Las Vegas. The entire interior of the ride has been gutted, except for the actual ride itself. According to engineers, they were built into the building during construction, and cannot be removed unless the entire center section of the casino is demolished so, as of December 2011, they stand there still.
As reported by OMNI magazine, the movie trilogy of "Secrets of the Luxor Pyramid", of which this show was the first part, cost US $50 million to make.
This particular show was screened inside a "Ridefilm" simulator, a motion-controlled, 15-passenger vehicle situated atop an orthogonal base, facing a stationary, 180-degree, spherically curved screen onto which the film was projected with a fish-eye lens. As the audience would be so close to the screen, Douglas Trumbull shot the live footage for the film at 48 frames per second, twice the normal speed, thus creating an exceptionally bright, sharp image. The process also entailed producing twice as many computer-generated images, all in very high resolution. On top of that, the distortion caused by projection on the spherical dome meant that the digital imagery likewise had to be subjected to an exactly matching fish-eye manipulation. [reported by OMNI and Popular Science magazines]
The Kleiser-Walczak Construction Company (led by Jeffrey Kleiser and Diana Walczak) created the digital effects for the three connected projects (the others being Luxor Live (1993) and Theater of Time (1993)) on a tight, 16-month schedule. They devoted more than twenty staff members, a group of seasoned computer animators and 25 Silicon Graphics workstations to the task. Later on, 3 IBM PVS (Power Visualization System) supercomputers were installed, each with 32 high-speed processors and a then massive over two gigabytes of memory, linked to a 21 GB disk array.
Wavefront Technologies animation software was used extensively, but quite a lot had to programmed from scratch, specifically for the project. This included the high-definition compositing of digital animation and live action by the tiniest fraction of an inch, simulation of a fish-eye lens distortion for the animated scenes (for which very advanced 4K-by-3K digital cameras were used), and a stereoscopic rendering module for the 3D sequence. [Sources: How did they do it? Computer Illusion in Film & TV, by Christopher W. Baker and Computer Graphics World magazine, October 1993]
Wavefront Technologies animation software was used extensively, but quite a lot had to programmed from scratch, specifically for the project. This included the high-definition compositing of digital animation and live action by the tiniest fraction of an inch, simulation of a fish-eye lens distortion for the animated scenes (for which very advanced 4K-by-3K digital cameras were used), and a stereoscopic rendering module for the 3D sequence. [Sources: How did they do it? Computer Illusion in Film & TV, by Christopher W. Baker and Computer Graphics World magazine, October 1993]
For the remaining one and a half minute of underground action, live motion-controlled miniature shots were combined with digital animation. In order to match the lighting on the various spacecraft, a second pass of the track was made with a ping-pong ball attached in front of the camera. The recorded reflections on the ping-pong ball were then digitally projected onto the computer-generated spaceships, from the eight corners of an imaginary cube. [Source: How did they do it? Computer Illusion in Film & TV, by Christopher W. Baker]