Bullet Lines

The tangle

A Chinese supplier of interactive dark rides was looking for simpler technical solutions to a very complicated problem. People in the ride vehicle can shoot with a laser gun at objects seen in game-like animation on large screens. The beams from the laserguns should also be visible in the animations on the screen, depending on where the car and its shooters are located.

The disentangler

I was asked by the Chinese builder if I could cut costs for their gaming dark rides. Once there it turned out that the software and the whole process didn’t function quite right either; there were problems with a dark ride they were building at the time. So some haste was needed. I immediately started making a project manual with all their wishes and requirements to be translated into a task package and deliverables for me.

The disentangling

I’ve been able to greatly simplify this whole technical process of interactively shooting lasers on and in a screen by simply tracking the exact location data of the vehicle via sensors, then determining the position of the shooters using formulas. As a result, it was no longer necessary to know their exact position with cameras and sensors. The software knows where the car is, and can calculate where the seats are, and then link the animated laser beams to it. These lines turned out to be precise enough for the riders to give the experience of being their own laser beams.

In addition, I have made the whole squinching process much easier. The guests drive past projection screens and can shoot at crooks in a 3D animation. To make it look realistic, the perspective of what you see changes with the position of the ride vehicles. Previously, the position of the vehicles was leading, just like in the rest of the entire system. But I turned it around for the animation and shooting process, so that the cart now moves with the animation timeloop. As soon as the vehicle comes close to a new screen, a sensor signals this and the projection starts. The vehicle then determines its position depending on the film. As a result, it is now more of a cart that rides along with an animation, instead of a moving vehicle in a game.

The disentangled result

The system of the simpler bullet lines and the modified squinching reduces the computer power by more than 80%.
They have now applied this principle in a number of dark rides in China.