May 6, 1999

STATE OF THE ART / By PETER H. LEWIS

Terrifying Precision in High-Tech Amusement Parks

'm trapped inside a 50,000-square-foot, three-dimensional comic strip. Spiderman jumps down onto the hood of my high-tech reporter's vehicle with a thump and warns me that Doctor Octopus and his evil henchpersons are running amok in Gotham. But my editor at The Daily Bugle says I've got to get the story.





Stuart Goldenberg

Fortunately, Spiderman saves me from certain death by lassoing my falling vehicle just as I'm composing my own obituary. And just as fortunately, the $100 million worth of highly advanced and experimental technology that went into creating the Spiderman 3-D ride works almost without a hitch.

But Scott Trowbridge, one of the technical masterminds behind the ride, is not particularly pleased. Some of the lasers did not fire on cue, the ride vehicle muffed some moves, and the psychoacoustic 3-D sound system malfunctioned. Computers reel off error messages, pagers buzz and 900-megahertz radios crackle as technicians scurry on catwalks and prowl through catacombs of digital equipment. Everyone is racing to fix all the glitches before the new park officially opens next week.

Spiderman is just one of several rides and attractions at Islands of Adventure that simply could not have been created, designed, built or operated without computers.

The importance of technology in entertainment these days arises in part from a long tradition of creative people taking advantage of new technological tools to tell stories. But on another level, it requires ever more advanced technology to impress a generation of consumers who have grown up with computer-generated 3-D graphics and dazzling movie special effects.

Theme park rides, blockbuster movies and even new computer game titles are becoming multimillion-dollar science projects. The mad scientists at Universal have spent their millions well, judging from all the adrenaline they extract from visitors.

"At the turn of the last century, electricity and magnets were the most advanced technologies at amusement parks," said Trowbridge, who describes himself as "a bit of a geek." "People would see tricks done with magnets and they would go away and talk about it for months. These days, we can't just float a paper clip over a magnet. Our audiences are much more sophisticated."

The new Incredible Hulk roller coaster ride at Universal, Trowbridge pointed out, is not your grandfather's roller coaster, the kind that slowly climbs, ka-klunk, ka-klunk, ka-klunk, up a steep incline until at the peak it noses over into a gravity-induced plunge. No, this one blasts upward from the starting ramp with the force of a jet fighter taking off from an aircraft carrier. At four-and-a-half G's of acceleration, I don't even have enough breath to scream before we spin, upside down, into a 360-degree weightless loop -- the first of many.



Even the sound of the roller coaster is digitally enhanced.

Laser beams bounce off the backs of the cars to measure position and acceleration, arrays of sensors along the tracks measure friction and calculate weight, and at the precise moment when the launching control computers determine that all is ready and safe, the pent-up energy is released in a sudden burst.

Even the sound of the roller coaster is digitally enhanced, to make the cars growl and shriek as they career around the track. As if more shrieking were needed.

Just as with the Spiderman ride, everything on the Hulk is timed to the millisecond, and every incoming data stream is analyzed by at least two different computers. If any of them detects the slightest variation from the norm, the system stops and pagers start vibrating on the belts of park administrators, engineers and technicians all over the park.

Universal is even thinking about renting pagers to the guests, delivering up-to-the-minute information on waiting times at each attraction or restaurant, weather reports and interactive maps. The staff at the park's hotels could page a wandering guest if a message or phone call arrived at the front desk.

Of course, pagers would have to be left behind on the Dueling Dragons roller coaster ride, actually a matched pair of intertwining tracks that, again thanks to precise synchronization made possible by banks of computers and sensors, make it appear that two rival groups of riders are going to collide at a combined speed of more than 100 miles an hour. Baseball caps, sunglasses and other articles of clothing go flying. Riders are not allowed to wear sandals, which would be flung off by the G-forces. (For maximum thrills, ride the front row of the blue dragon.)

Next door, in Poseidon's Adventure, visitors enter the lost city of Atlantis through a 25-foot tunnel of water without getting wet.





Engineers in Canada brought Sarah, a 23-foot, 7.5-ton triceratops, to life, a few months ago.

How real is it? "It sneezes, it snorts, it urinates, it flatulates and goop comes out of its nostrils," said Tom Williams, president of Universal Studios Florida Escape, which encompasses all of Universal's vacation operations in the state. Everything -- its skin texture; its eyes, which dilate; its puffs of breath, synchronized with the movement of the rib cage, and its bellows and whimpers -- is the result of pushing technology to its current limits. At a recent preview, children in the audience, and even some adults, momentarily forgot that dinosaurs have been extinct for 65 million years.

But the T. rex of the new park -- that's a "T" as in technology -- is Spiderman. "This project was such a beast," Trowbridge said. "We were inventing technology and inventing processes as we went."

The Spiderman ride takes carloads of 12 people, all wearing special polarized sunglasses, through what is in effect a combination fun house and movie theater. Multiple sets of twin, high-speed 70-millimeter film projectors have precise timing as they flash 3-D scenes on both flat and curved Imax-size surfaces in front of the cars as they pass. The polarized glasses blend the images and create the illusion that the viewer is inside the scene. Hence, Spiderman can seem to land on the hood of the car as it moves.

The fact that the car is moving is the real challenge for 3-D effects, which normally require the viewer to be sitting in a fixed spot to achieve the illusion of being inside a three-dimensional space. Trowbridge and his crew developed ways to dynamically distort the 3-D films in a way that tracks the movement of the cars, the first time that has been done in such a setting. The result is that everyone in the car stays in the 3-D world as the car loops, spins and races along the track.

It makes going back into the real three-dimensional world seem rather tame.



State of the Art is published on Thursdays. Click here for a list of links to other columns in the series.

Peter H. Lewis at lewis@nytimes.com welcomes your comments and suggestions.