Visitors this season to Busch Gardens Williamsburg will be startled to find a huge forbidding fortress has risen out of the Germany section of the park. Called “Curse of DarKastle: The Ride,” the attraction houses a state-of-the-art 4-D ride that hurls guests on a perilously haunting sleigh ride through the dark icy corridors of a Bavarian castle. It’s just the latest entry in a burgeoning field of high-tech 4-D amusement attractions that are incorporating some astonishing technological designs and effects. The ride most often mentioned by both designers and parks as the milestone attraction in the evolution of 4-D has been “The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man” at Universal’s Islands of Adventure in Orlando, Florida. (For more on “SpiderMan,” look for the profile on Gary Goddard, the attraction’s designer, in the October issue of FUNWORLD.) “‘Spider-Man’ was a touchstone moment that showed people a different way of doing things and got them thinking about what else could be done,” says George Johnsen, chief animation and technology officer at Threshold Entertainment in Santa Monica, California, which developed the sophisticated “BORG Invasion 4-D” ride for the Las Vegas Hilton in Nevada. “Mobile focus 3-D had been done for the military for a long time, but ‘Spider-Man’ put it in the public entertainment sector.” “BORG” opened in March 2004, and Johnsen says it also incorporated many progressive technologies: “It has multiple angles of 3-D that are extreme. Also, there’s a second pair of screens off to the side with completely different characters showing up, and it all runs together in four different high-definition (HD) formats. Finally, it has a huge integrated digital playback system with 24-channel audio.”

“Curse of DarKastle” continues to up the ante in 4-D. According to those who worked on the project, it sets new technology standards in several areas. “‘Spider-Man’ set the initial standard for that type of attraction, but I think ‘DarKastle’ takes it to a higher level because of the innovative new technol­ogy applied there, such as the design and implementation of HD video on this large scale,” says Tony Peugh, CTS­I, senior project manager on “DarKas­tle” for Electrosonic of Orlando, which provided the attraction’s video, audio, and projection control.

Cecil Magpuri, founder of Falcon’s Treehouse in Windermere, Florida, which designed “DarKastle,” agrees. “A lot’s been learned since ‘Spider-Man’ came out. ‘DarKastle’s’ not 70 mm film, but digital video, which doesn’t degrade and doesn’t get burn-in as film does, so it’s affordable,” he asserts. “Also, the ride vehicles that Oceaneering chose are unbelievable, far better than we expected. They give a smoothness of flight, like floating on air, that would have been difficult in the past.”

4-D Rides vs. Theaters
There are two main types of 4-D attractions: 4-D rides and 4-D the­aters. Each has its advantages and technological challenges, says Michael Needham, president of SimEx ! Iwerks in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, which has installed 250 spe­cial effects attractions in 30 coun­tries. “Rides have less story because they’re shorter, and theaters have a longer and simpler show, but they also have greater capacity,” he explains. “The 4-D ride’s program­ming and maintenance of simulation and track equipment is much more complex, intense, and costly. But the 4-D theater seats now have 14 or 15 effects—vibrations, leg ticklers, mist, water, smells.”

Busch Gardens Williamsburg has experience with both 4-D rides and fixed 4-D theaters, and Vice Presi­dent of Design and Engineering Larry Giles says, “The ride pieces are much more difficult to pull off. You’re inter­acting the ride vehicle with the scene, and the imagery, angles, and viewpoints constantly change, whereas the theater types are more like a movie.”

Peugh agrees, adding, “DarKastle has nine HD 3-D projectors and two 74-foot-wide, 24-foot-high curved screens. That’s a serious bit of engi­neering design.”

But Johnsen sees a much more basic engineering challenge to 4-D rides: “We have to do a lot of math. We’re doing numerous calculations, and the difference between doing it in a the­ater and doing it in motion is that you’re having to recalculate those sight lines over and over again.” How­ever, he does see one way in which the motion of rides makes the design process easier: “That physical sensa­tion really contributes to the effect and forgives calculation errors you might make, whereas in the theater, you have to make people feel like they’re moving.

Turn-key Pricing
One drawback to 4-D attractions, espe­cially the rides, is the technology’s high cost. “They’re north of $5 million up to $10 million or $15 million,” reveals Needham. “When they’re that expen­sive, it’s hard to get takers.”

Roger Houben, managing director of 3DBA in Knokke Heist, Belgium, has tackled this challenge. Known for years in the industry for his work with roller coasters at Vekoma, Houben is now making 4-D attractions affordable. “Pre­viously, nobody was offering affordable solutions. Everything was in the budgets of Universal and Disney,” Houben says. “The answer was to be an integrater and offer turn-key solutions, so I researched all the companies involved worldwide and teamed up with some of them.” Houben says these include Electrosonic and Oceaneering from the United States, Kraftwerk of Austria, and nWave of Belgium.

Houben contends that his partner­ship can offer small video resolution attractions for as little as $60,000 to $100,000. 3DBA opened its first theater at the Minimundus Bodensee museum in Germany and has others planned for the Arcol resort in Indonesia, an FEC in Moscow, and at science centers in Aus­tralia and the United States.

As the price of 4-D attractions con­tinues to drop and more 3-D films become available, zoos, aquariums, and museums are getting in on the act. Johnsen says that the proliferation of science-based media is forcing these attractions to look seriously at 4-D. “At a zoo or aquarium, just having an exotic creature is not enough [anymore] because people have seen that so much on the Discovery Channel and National Geographic,” he observes. “But now you can present creatures in a new and unique way, like actually being able to walk into the center of a 3-D aquarium, which is something we’re working on.”

Johnsen says the opportunity for museums is quite profound. Through 4­D technology, an art museum could take guests inside the workshops of famous painters and sculptors, while other museums could allow guests to relive his­tory. “You can take historical things like Pompei, put people inside the environ­ment, and make it realistic ... they can actually live history. These are hugely powerful teaching tools,” he submits.

Truly Making It Real
Since the 1950s, moviegoers have been donning 3-D glasses, and though the video quality has certainly improved, many park guests wonder why the glasses are still necessary a half-century later. “Our engineers don’t think we’ll be able to do away with them soon,” sighs Need­ham, “though something may be done soon with holograms. As the types and styles of glasses change, we may find they’re not the negatives they’ve been in the past.” Says Houben: “There’s a 3­D plasma screen, quite small, that you can see without the 3-D glasses. There’s quite a bit of development happening for doing 3-D without glasses.”

But Johnsen isn’t sure that the 3-D glasses are such a big issue: “We’ve all seen ‘Star Wars’ when Princess Leia comes out of R2-D2’s belly as a holo­graphic projection, but free-air projec­tion just isn’t quite there yet. If you give guests a boring show, they hate the glasses. If you give them something creative and exciting, they don’t even think about them.”

One way to circumvent the glasses and truly add a fourth dimension is with live actors, but the ride or theater must have a high capacity to justify the cost. “BORG Invasion 4-D” and “Termina­tor 2: 3-D” (Universal Orlando) both integrate live actors into the show. “I think they’re great, but the execution has to be well done,” declares Magpuri. “If you do it with voice-overs so the actors only have to play out the motions, then it’s better because it con­sistently maintains the quality from show to show, actor to actor.”

Bringing a technology as complex as 4-D to its current state has not been without growing pains and challenges. Needham recalls a particular instance when the complex technologies created a bit of a gaffe. “We opened up a lovely 4-D museum called Science North in Sudbury, Canada, and because they were so proud, they invited Ontario’s Minister of Culture, who came in an expensive bright red suit,” recalls Need­ham. “We hadn’t quite finished adjust­ing all the 4-D—we’d worked all night—and got to this scene where there’s a great splash. Well, the minister leapt out of the seat because she was pretty well drenched!”

Giles agrees that adjusting and coordinating all the effects of 4-D attractions is a tall order: “Getting everything to work together is the biggest challenge. You’ve got video, audio, and all the many effects that have to be synchronized.”  

What’s Ahead
As exciting as the recent developments in 4-D have been, there are some exhil­arating possibilities on the horizon. Needham sees another generation of 4­D seats coming in one to three years that can be individually programmed, and Giles envisions 3-D being filmed with a single camera. Falcon’s Treehouse is working on a cutting-edge delivery sys­tem that will allow them to do away with 3-D glasses, according to Magpuri.

Threshold Entertainment has several things in the works. “We’ve submitted for patent a process for infinite-focus 3-D,” Johnsen says. “Formerly with 3-D, when they poked a stick at you, the end of the stick was the only thing in focus. But now people can look around and focus on everything else. Also, holographic sound projections—highly directionable and scalable. Finally, we’re close to developing a cell processor that allows us to do real-time reactive 4-D attractions and that will lead to multi-instance reactive stuff where you can actually interact between multiple locations within one attraction, or multiple locations across a country or even the world.”