Universal looks to blend reality and fantasy in new show system
Here's an interesting question about dark rides. The main thing about theme park dark rides is that they are almost always, well, dark.
Night time provides a great environment for stories. It's spooky and mysterious. The dark sky and low light of night time offers a handy environment for theme park designers when they want to create an indoor ride or attraction. It's just easier to make an environment look natural when you set it in night time instead of the bright, harsh, revealing light of day time.
But here is the trade off. When you go on a dark ride in the middle of the day, the transition from outside to inside feels harsh. Now, that can be nice when you are roasting in the summer sun. But the immediate transition from day to night can make whatever follows inside feel especially unnatural.
In many cases, that works for the attraction and its story. But here is that interesting question - what if you don't want that harsh transition?
What if you want your dark ride to ease people from their surrounding environment into your fantastic one? What if you don't want your audience to know when reality ends and your storytelling starts? How do you do that?
In a patent application published today, Universal proposes a way to make that happen on theme park attractions. "Show Effect System for Amusement Park Attraction System" details how sensors, control systems, and displays could work together to create a simulated environment that borrows elements from the real world outside an attraction.
The low-tech way of bringing the outside world into a dark ride is with a window. But what if you wanted to do more with that look outside? What if you wanted to manipulate that outside view, to begin to introduce storytelling elements?
That is what Universal's patent application proposes. The system would take, say, video of the outside and manipulate it for display inside.
Image from Universal's patent application
"For example, a guest transitioning from an outdoor portion of a queue may not fully realize that indoor imagery provided by the display is not the outdoor environment, because real weather and/or foliage patterns may be mimicked in the generated imagery based on detection of outdoor conditions," Universal patent application said. "This allows for introduction of desired illusions (e.g., a sun or moon with human features or a flying pig passing through an otherwise realistic sky) in the imitation environment that feel consistent with the real outdoor environment."
The result would be a different type of dark ride - one that exists in the liminal space between reality and fantasy.
You can read the entire patent application here: Show Effect System for Amusement Park Attraction System.
Replies (4)
This seems like something more than just the images of ride matching the time of the day. That's easy to program just by time of day. This would be taking images from the outside and putting them on a screen that looks like a real window and then having effects appear. And the images would mimic not only the light (day/dusk/night) but also how cloudy it is or if it's raining. I imagine it seeming like AR without having to wear AR glasses or hold up a phone.
Bingo. I should have thought of that analogy - it's AR without the headset. Thanks for that.
This sounds really good for a queue. If curse of the werewolf came a few years later, the full moon illusion could have been better. This reminds me of Velocicoaster in two ways: the scene where the raptors chase the train through the second launch, and the fact that the pre show switches between daytime and nighttime. It's cool to see universal kind of build on that.
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Doesn't Disney (and other companies) already do this? MFSR adjusts the images on the ride to match the outside lighting (day/dusk/night).