Flying Theatres
Simtec HEXaFLITE
Theatre to reach Vietnam, where it then had to be unpacked and re-assembled. During the installation the Mini Flying Theatre is electrical tested as well as load tested with water barrels, while the dome screen is constructed around it. Once all complete the team were finally able to test the ride with the screen and media for the first time. The ride was rigorously tested in this commissioning stage, with the motion programming synchronised with the on-screen media as well as having people from the park come in and test out the experience as well.” Simworx CEO Terry Monkton continues: “Moving forward we’ll probably begin to see operators looking to break the trend a bit and look for more narrative driven content, so the experience is less passive, and visitors feel more immersed in a storyline, which will be more fitting for theme parks as storytelling is one of their main goals with any new attraction. We’ve begun to see this in examples like Pandora’s Flight of Passage where a popular IP is being incorporated into the storytelling. “Seeing IP’s more heavily integrated into the
theming and story of flying theatres will be how theme parks continue to make keep this genre of attraction fresh and fun. 4D Cinemas were relatively new 15 years ago but have become a staple attraction for every theme park worldwide now. We believe the same will be true for flying theatres. As with everything, as technology evolves so will the product, we’ll continue to see improvements in motion dynamics, special effects integration and screen/ projection techniques. But
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Andreas Stickel Flying theatres are
indoor attractions and as such, have to deal with the same pandemic caused challenges as shopping centres and other indoor facilities.
we may also begin to see elements from our other favourite media-based attractions incorporated into flying theatres, such as interactivity. As the product matures within the market it will also be about finding more efficient ways of building it with new emerging technology and therefore, we’ll slowly begin to see the costs of the Flying theatre reducing in the future as we all find better ways of engineering this type of attraction to reduce the cost per seat. “Regarding the social distancing aspect, as rides
like these can take almost a year from proposal to completion, expecting social distancing to be as imperative a factor when designing rides for the future is unlikely. With the vaccine rollout looking promising across the world, creating attractions that will be expected to be a main stay of parks - for many years - and are suited to accommodate a full capacity with high efficiency will be a bigger priority for when the pandemic has passed, and a ride is still operating. Making such a major
investment in a ride with any major modifications would be unlikely, if parks are thinking long term.” Dynamic Attraction’s Cindy Emerick Whitson
says: “The flying theatres can be disinfected easy between shows, but we are hopeful that the vaccines will be here so that we can operate efficiently.” “FlyRide guests load into separate ride bays on
different levels. Fortunately, and by happy chance, social distancing was built into our FlyRide design” says Mike Frueh, SimEx-Iwerks Entertainment.” Triotech’s Christian Martin tells Park World:
“It will be very hard for attractions designers to completely transform a ride to include current (social) physical distancing guidelines, for several reasons. Firstly, the guidelines vary from region to region. For instance, through the last year we have seen moments when the requirements for distancing in North America was two metres; 1.5m in some European countries, and one metre in China. This makes it particularly hard to design until a standard is adopted.” Secondly, says Christian, rides are “judged” by
their capacity: “Parks and other operators always evaluate capacity (THRC) vs investment necessary for any give attraction. Distancing seats, platforms, or any way guests get on a ride tends to cripple this equation. This is ok temporarily in the hard times brought upon by the pandemic. However, it cannot become permanent otherwise these types of attractions will have a hard time to become a justifiable investment.” Thirdly, the temporary nature of current
distancing guidelines: “The distancing guidelines WINTER PART 2 2021
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