Designing Attractions the Operations Staff Will Also Enjoy

Feb 1, 2001 12:00 PM, Mike Haimson

KEY ONE: COMMONALITY

ALTHOUGH METREON HAS THREE VERY UNIQUE entertainment attractions (The Way Things Work, Airtight Garage and Where the Wild Things Are), a single operations team must maintain all three. This team must also support special events and maintain security systems, overall building background music and architectural displays. I made the decision early on that at no time would the show quality be compromised, but the attractions must share a common design philosophy and use common components. This would make the attractions easier to operate because they would share similar functions, use common components, and could share spare parts.

There are two main areas where a common design philosophy can make a huge impact on the ease of operations and maintenance in a multi-attraction venue like Metreon: show control and audio-video processing. It is not surprising that these areas share the common need for convenient human interfaces. Keeping the user interface design consistent can save an incredible amount of design dollars, with an even greater savings in operations cost.

I use the term “common user interface design” to mean commonality in anything an operator or technician uses. This includes locations of control panels and jacks on walls, procedures to start and stop the attraction and graphical user interfaces on computer screens. It is also important to have a common scheme for the cable and component labeling, speaker and projector mounting and systems documentation.

KEY TWO: COOPERATION

There were three primary audio-video integrator companies and several other technology vendors working on the attractions. The three primary integrators are: David Carroll Associates for The Way Things Work, Baker Audio for Airtight Garage and the Intellisys Group for Where the Wild Things Are. We formed the Metreon Attraction Technologies Team and handled issues of attraction standards. It was a great forum to discuss ongoing design and installation challenges, in addition to the key city code issues that needed to be constantly addressed: wheelchair accessibility, seismic bracing for hanging systems and the Underwriters Laboratories approval of custom technology items like robots, animated props and motion-controlled simulators. This multivendor team worked well together toward the success of all of the attractions.

KEY THREE: CONTROLS

Show control was key in making the attractions easy to operate and maintain. We chose the Anitech Systems Media Pro 4000 as the show control system for all attractions. It is rugged yet flexible and easily expandible. Typically the Media Pro system is programmed and the show run from a single start button. We used a custom operator control console to control the primary functions of each attraction. The OCC consists of several pushbutton switches, a telephone and a paging microphone. It also has a 4-line display for showing system health information and usage statistics. A standard Metreon OCC was developed and deployed throughout each attraction.

The OCC also has another very important button: the emergency stop. Since many of the attractions in Metreon contain mechanical systems with moving parts, an emergency stop was needed for safety purposes. Again, a standard Metreon emergency stop circuit was developed and used throughout all the attractions. The Anitech manages an emergency stop voltage bus that is released when the OCC button is pressed. This bus release does not use software; it is driven by the release of relays that cannot be reset without a key. Before a Metreon attraction is restarted after an emergency stop, procedure calls for a thorough visual inspection and an interview with whomever pressed the emergency stop. Since the city of San Francisco classified Metreon as a public amusement building, a fire alarm event must also trigger an immediate shutdown of all the attractions and bring the lights up. This was built in to the Metreon emergency stop unit and the Anitech system.

The OCC provides a convenient user interface for the attractions with only a few buttons designed for the show operations staff. The technical operations staff also needs to use the OCC, mainly to get information about the “health” of the attractions. This is particularly important during system start-up, shut-down and diagnostics. To accommodate this need, we created a Microsoft Visual Basic application that uses the RSView software from Allen Bradley to talk to the Media Pro 4000. Each Metreon attraction has an administration PC that has an RS-232 interface to the Media Pro 4000 Intelligent Control Module. Since the attraction show runs entirely on the microprocessors within the Media Pro 4000, the administration PC is only used for system updates and as an attraction graphical user interface. The RSView software uses the DF1 protocol to talk to the Media Pro 4000 as a SLC 500 slave. Using Visual Basic, we were able to add many nice graphical control and status display features for each attraction.

In Airtight Garage, more controls are needed for the show operator than the OCC can provide to support the virtual reality game systems. When Metreon opened, there were 41 Quaternia game units, 29 Badlands motion simulator pods, 21 Hyperbowl game units and 12 miscellaneous game units. To control this enormous number of networked game systems, a Metreon operator control panel was developed. The OCP consists of a touchscreen display with a Visual Basic application running on a computer. The Badlands area has an OCP, and a second OCP is shared between the Hyperbowl and Quaternia game area. The OCP is used to verify the health of each game system, to allow an operator to abort a game or reset the whole game system, and to assist with customer team scheduling.

Each OCP computer is interfaced to both the Media Pro 4000 show control system and the game server for each of the groups of networked virtual reality games. Since the OCP can “talk” to the game server and the show control system, an event in the game can control room lighting and other special effects. The main function of the game servers is to process the virtual world, coordinating data for each networked player in a game. As players move or shoot weapons, their positions in the virtual world are calculated and updated by the game server. The game system graphics and audio effects are processed by the local game PC located in the custom-built cabinet. Each Badlands motion simulator system also has a motion control PC that controls the DC motors for the 2-axis pod and the vehicle electronics.

In The Way Things Work and Where the Wild Things Are, there are maintenance control panels for the animated props. These panels are called Hand-Off-Auto switches. In the Auto position, the prop is controlled by the show control system. In the Off position, the prop may not be triggered. In the Hand position, the switch triggers the prop once and the show control system is still disconnected. The HOA switches are used to test props that may be faulty or to isolate faulty props from the show before they can be repaired. There are also HOA-like switches for the automatic doors in these attractions.

Another convenient and standard Metreon attraction maintenance panel is the remote programming panel. Each attraction has two or three RPPs with programming jacks for the lighting system, show control system and audio system. A show programmer can sit with the creative designer and adjust lighting, show timing and audio parameters while in the middle of the show space. The RPPs were used extensively to program and commission each attraction. They are available now to assist in changing any show parameters or to test major pieces of new equipment from within the show environment.

KEY FOUR: A/V PROCESSING

The next step after standardizing the show control system and strategy is defining an audio processing and distribution strategy. We standardized on the MediaMatrix system from Peavey. Each attraction has its own Mainframe 980. The audio is processed by the mainframe and distributed as digital signals via CobraNet to I/O devices throughout the attraction. Audio analog-to-digital conversion and digital-to-analog conversion is provided by CAB 8is and CAB 8os, respectively. The MediaMatrix system allows the show's audio routing and processing to be designed graphically on a PC and compiled into the mainframe. Real-time event control, such as audio ducking for paging, can also be handled by the MediaMatrix system. Real event control from the show is accomplished via an RS-232 interface between the Anitech Show Control system and the MediaMatrix Mainframe. On an emergency stop event, the attraction audio is muted. When a building fire alarm is triggered, the attraction audio is also muted, and the building-wide emergency paging may be injected into audio signal path.

Developing a video processing and distribution strategy is also important. Most video at Metreon was stored as compressed M-JPEG composite video on hard-disk recorders and played directly to a monitor or projector. For compressed video storage, we used the V1m from Doremi Labs. The Way Things Work main theater required a higher level of video quality. The theater uses three 18-foot-diagonal screens and we wanted to play back uncompressed video from a D1 original source. To meet this demand, we used four Diskcovery hard-disk recorders from Sierra Design Labs.

Audio storage is the last key item in our audio-video decision strategy kit. At Metreon, background music is stored on CDs and played on Sony CDP-D500 industrial CD players. Audio for looping sound effects are stored on PC cards that plug into Digital Sound Modules within the Anitech show control system main cage. Sound effects that are triggered and/or may overlap with sounds on the same device are stored on PC cards that are in the Liberty system from Maris Ltd. Audio that must be synchronized to video or other audio tracks is stored on Tascam MMP-16 16-track hard-disk recorders. Simple stereo audio tracks for video were stored on the Doremi video disk recorders.

Crown amplifiers are used exclusively throughout the attractions. Background and specialty speakers used include JBL, Renkus-Heinz and Bose. ATK AudioTek makes the front main theater speakers and subwoofer in The Way Things Work attraction. Video projectors and video monitors were manufactured by Sony.

Mike Haimson, principal of Carousel Interactive Technologies, worked for Sony Development as the senior project engineer for the Metreon attractions. He was responsible for the overall design and installation for the audio, video, show control and other technologies involved in the three main attractions. He can be reached at mike@carouseltech.com.