Student's Choice Project: VR and Theme Park Rides

How Do They Work?

So how do VR roller coasters work? I had a rough idea but had to consult this article for some of the specifics. It seems that most VR roller coasters use Samsung Gear VR headsets and Oculus to play the applications on the Samsung Galaxies while held inside head mounted displays. These head mounted displays are either tethered to the roller coaster train cars, like Galactica at Alton Towers, or are portable and are just clipped to the train car for the duration of the ride. With the tethered ones you would only need as many as the roller coaster's capacity, but have to be cleaned between each and every ride, and with it being tethered this increases loading time as the people who clean them and the riders cannot both be in the same space simultaneously so the riders have to wait to board. With the portable headsets you would need a few times the coasters capacity, but you have the luxury of being able to unclip them and have riders hand it to the cleaning guy behind the booth near the exit, allowing the next wave of riders to immediately start boarding. The Samsung Galaxies communicate  with a "black box" on the roller coaster train. This "black box" holds sensors help communicate between itself and the app on the phone in order to synchronize what the user sees with what the user feels (more on this can be found here). As an example, let's say in the VR experience you're fleeing from somebody while flying through St. Louis and you are about to loop through the Gateway Arch to try and evade them. The people in the first cars of the roller coaster will start going around / enter the loop before the people in the back of the train. Due to this the VR experience shown can't be synchronized across all headsets (the exact same visuals should not be displayed for all riders at a single moment in time). The people in the back of the train may see themselves turning up before reaching the base of the loop, causing a discrepancy between the user's visual and motion sensors, making the user nauseous. So these sensors on the trains are important in keeping the experience not synchronized, but consistent for all riders on the roller coaster. The apps themselves require quite a bit of time and effort to create because the roller coaster track has to be recreated inch by inch. That is what makes the virtual reality work, the synchronization and perfect scaling between the VR app and the real coaster. msung/ 

Figment Productions, who worked on the VR coaster at Alton Towers in the U.K. Used a slightly different approach than talked about above. The original article can be found here. In summary, they fitted a train with an accelerometer and gyroscope and sent it around the track a few times. This was done to create a master path of data for the rollercoaster train. Each seat was fitted with a control pack (like the "black box" from before) that contained accelerometers, gyroscopes, WiFi and Bluetooth modules. Then while the ride is in motion, each rider's control pack generates similar data to the master path and by comparing the data to the master path, they can pinpoint location. The control pack then communicates this positional data to the rider's headset so that they see the proper visuals.

Another feature of some VR coasters is the ability to occupy yourself during the most boring part of the ride, the lift hill. If you've been on a roller coaster before (a reasonably tall one at least) you know that the top of the lift hill can be the most exciting part. It's the place where your heart feels like it's about to jump out of your chest in anticipation of the huge plunge that lies ahead of you. You also know that it usually takes a while to get to this point as the roller coaster has to leave the station, sometimes twist and turn to align itself with the lift hill, then climb it. Some climb fast, some climb slow and some are slower than slow and make you question if you'll make it off the ride before the park closes. Some roller coasters will give you either controllers or have buttons that you can press on the side of the head mounted display too that you can use to actually interact with the virtual environment around you while ascending the lift hill and make the rides most boring part fun! In the case of the Rise of the Gargoyles VR experience that Six Flags had implemented, the riders get to shoot at gargoyles upon ascending the lift hill, sometimes with controllers, sometimes via pressing buttons on the side of the head mounted display, sometimes by just looking at the incoming assailants. There is a video showing this below, also from the Demon at Six Flags Great America.

Non Roller Coaster Theme Park Applications And My Ideas For VR Rides

VR in theme parks isn't just limited to roller coasters. There's plenty of other rides that could be enhanced with VR. The article here was helpful. Instead of the routine swinging pirate ships that are popular, you can now ride a dragon in Dragon's Fury.

There are the rides like the Giant Drop at Six Flags Great America that bring you up really high, and then let you plummet to the ground. These drop tower rides alone make me short of breath and make my arms go numb, but for those crazy enough to want an even more intense experience, the drop can be experienced as a helicopter crash like with Drop of Doom at Six Flags Great Adventure, New Jersey.  

Of course VR in theme parks is not limited to moving rides. Something that I wanted to do In Vegas, but didn't get to, was the Virtual Reality Experience in the MGM Grand, which is over 2000 square feet in size. They offer multiplayer VR experiences such as Zombie Apocalypse and Outbreak Origins, which are shooters, as well as puzzle games like Eng\ineerium, and mysteries like Singularity.  

VR Theme Park Immersion to the Max

On April 29, 2018 in Guizhou, China a new theme park opened called Oriental Science Fiction Valley. No biggie, right? Well, it's a unique theme park in the sense that it features 35 rides over 330 acres, almost all of which include AR/VR/motion display experiences. Unfortunately their website isn't that good and I couldn't obtain a list of all of the rides like I would have liked to. Below is a picture of it and a video overview. Note that the picture is not of one of the experiences, that's the actual theme park! They built a gigantic robot with a futuristic skyline on top of it!

My Experience with a VR Roller Coaster

 I went to Las Vegas for the first time and from the hotel I could see this (Same hotel tower, opposing end): 

I wasn't necessarily planning on doing too much due to homework, but when I saw the roller coaster across the street I knew I had to ride it. Upon arriving at the entrance, which you seemingly had to go through a maze to get to, I saw that they had two ways to ride, a regular way, and with Virtual Reality. As this was literally within 24 hours after our first virtual reality project was due, I knew I had to do it. Plus I never knew VR roller coasters even existed, increasing my excitement. $15 non-VR, $20 with VR, $28 for both. That was a no brainer. 

The first ride I chose to be my non-VR ride. Since I enjoy more pronounced hills and feelings of weightlessness I chose the last seat on the roller coaster train ("Wait, it makes a difference where I sit?"). The train was modeled after a taxi cab with traditional yellow color and checkerboard pattern, ironic considering I didn't see a single taxi that actually looked like that on the strip. After the ride attendants took care of the VR riders at the front of the train, they secured my lap bar and shoulder rest and soon we were off. There was a nice view on top of the lift hill and then a huge plunge before approaching the top of the first hill. I sat at the back to get the most intense experience and what a stupid choice that was! You see, I always wear contacts when I go to theme parks, and had brought my contacts with but forgot the solution!; so I very quickly remembered what my hesitation to ride was. Going over the top of the first hill my glasses slipped up, but not off my face. I proceeded to spend the next minute or so preventing my glasses from flying onto Las Vegas Blvd., before the brakes were applied and we crawled back to the station. I still saw a good chunk of the ride and felt every turn and loop and it was definitely worth it!

After getting back in line to redeem my second ride and shown how to operate the VR headset (chin strap, tighten or loosen head strap, etc) I was asked a question that I was not prepared to answer, "Monsters or Aliens?" I wanted to reply both, but instead asked her which one was more popular. With no direct answer, I went with Aliens. I wanted the back of the train again, but I was instructed that VR riders were in the first four rows only. I went with Row 4. After pulling down the shoulder rest and the lap bar I put on the headset and the attendant checked it and asked me if it was working. I looked around and I was the passenger of a virtual Jeep with a scientist driving. We were stopped in front of a Star Wars-like airtight door with a bench with a computer and fire extinguisher to my right. I confirmed and soon I felt the train start moving. "Here we go!" I think, excited. That excitement was gone before I made it out of the station. The roller coaster leaves the station and takes a left. My virtual view rotates to the left and I am staring at the scientist. I look to my right and the door did not open. The roller coaster for some reason didn't sense that it had left the station and never played the experience. So I was stuck sitting and rotating in a virtual Jeep while in reality my body was experiencing varying G-Force, going upside down, being jostled up and down. Not too long into the ride I noticed the headset coming loose so I rotated the knob on the back clockwise to re-tighten it. I had to do this 3 times during the ride's duration, which made the experience worse. And at one point near the end, the train sharply banked upwards with some decent G-force as I was bringing my elbow down and ... Whack! Right on the funny bone. I almost cried. I couldn't move my completely numb pinky, my whole left arm was burning, but I didn't feel much nausea so I thought I was ok. When we pulled back into the station I informed them that it didn't work and after looking through the headset and verifying this was actually the case I was asked another question I wasn't really ready for, "Would you like to ride again or get a refund?" If I got a refund I would save some money and I wouldn't risk numbing my right arm or feeling sick. If I rode again I could experience something revolutionary and that memory would stick with me forever. Unless it didn't work again, but the probability of that occurring is low so I chose to ride again.

So now's a good time to mention that I'm not a lucky person in terms of having good luck. And this was one of the times where that really gets emphasized. So I choose Aliens again and reboard into the same seat that I had last time, pull down the shoulder rest, etc. We take off but this time as the roller coaster starts moving, the airtight doors open and there's ambient sound from the scene playing (Thank God!!) My newly found scientist buddy and I are cruising through a laboratory with many scientists and offices. Then we go out onto a loading dock and we go to exit the dock area and head outside. The amount of detail and animation was very impressive. I see an alien pop up on the screen and as we follow him, my scientist friend appears to show no emotion and no intent other than to blindly follow a random alien. As the roller coaster ascends the lift hill it appears in my VR world like we are driving up a road on the side of a cliff. As we get to the top the alien seems to attach a sort of cable from the vehicle to a gigantic robot that obviously wants us dead. I knew it was a bad idea to follow him!! It yanks us off the cliff as we go into the first drop. The vehicle is falling towards the ground but is attached by that cable so it stiffens and we start heading back upwards, back towards.... yeah that's how the story ended for me too. The suspense is built, and I was just about to be dragged through space by a giant angry killer robot and the damn device resets. I'm almost immediately thrown back into the same room, same Jeep, same scientist, that I started  out with and was stuck in last time. So as I tighten my non-interactive headset, I start to feel sick. Like really sick! After re-tightening my headset a few more times and closing my eyes to try to feel less nauseous we arrived back at the station. When I exited I told them about it and was asked the same question. While trying not to cover the attendant with my vomit, I managed to inform them that this time I would gladly take a refund. They refunded the $20 VR price. So I guess the only optimistic takeaway here is that I rode three times for only $8, which I'm pretty sure even beats Military and Senior rates for the ride. On the downside I felt sick for about an hour to an hour and a half. I have done VR multiple times and even while making and testing my/our first VR game I have never felt simulator sickness. 

Below is a video of what I was supposed to experience.