Fairground: Thrill Laboratory - Apparatus
Apparatus:
Telemetry Experiment and Thrill-Lab-Lotto
Equator, Health-Smart, and Aerial
Win the Thrill-Lab-Lotto and you’ll get the chance to be hooked up to a specially developed wireless telemetry system – including heart monitor, accelerometer and face-cam – as you’re whirled around on the ride. Raw video and physiological data will be analysed and projected live onto the Science Museum building.
It’s fun to see your heart race, your face become contorted, and to watch how many Gs you’re pulling, but what if the ride could analyse all this data real-time? Would it decide to spin you faster or slower, change the music you were listening to, or force you to sit next to a stranger just to maximize your thrilling experience? This collaborative research takes the next steps in answering these questions.
Health-Smart Team:
Tuvi Orbach, CEO; with Rupert Stocks and Josh Greifer
What’s in a heartbeat? Quite a lot about your fitness levels, ability to cope under pressure and emotional state. While experiencing thrill you release adrenaline that makes your heart beat faster. In fact your heartbeat has variability influenced by fitness and emotional state. But how can we monitor changes in your body when you’re whirling around on a fairground ride?
Health-Smart has developed some fancy kit with an ECG sensor that’s constantly checking out your heartbeat and an optical sensor that monitors your pulse. There’s also an accelerometer (technology that can confirm you are going faster, if that’s what you want) and a video link to capture the riders’ facial expressions. All the information is collected by this array of sensors and wirelessly whizzed to a PC that picks up the signals.
The truly cunning part is the Bluetooth communication link, which means you can send wireless information and monitor the signals from the sensors in real time. It’s all done with the aid of some behind-the-scenes software that amplifies, digitises and analyses ready for immediate display. The data will take centre stage on screens around the Dana Centre and be projected onto the back of the Science Museum for the audiences’ delectation. But what will the Thrill experts have to say about it...?
Equator Team:
Tom Rodden, Nottingham University (team leader)
Holger Schnädelbach and Steve Benford, with Marina Ng, Stefan Rennick Egglestone, Michael Wright, Nottingham University
Anthony Steed, University College London
Angus Clark and Henk Muller, Bristol University
The Rides:
The Miami Trip (Pleasure)
Keith Stanworth’s Miami Trip
The Miami Trip hit the UK fairground scene in December 1990 following a period of disjointed development in Europe. Very suddenly the ride became a success, for the showmen because of the ease of portability and fitting in, and for the punters because it re-invigorates all the aspect of a social fairground ride – put simply, a ‘party in motion’. Its large back-flash has paved the way for the next generation of fairground art – creating a space for an explosive, immediate, singular narrative as opposed to traditional repeating geometric patterns and figures. Intrinsically linked to the dance culture of the last decade, the Miami Trip has put UK airbrush artists at the top of their league. The preponderance of this ride on the fairground does not detract from its impact – it forms a ‘sounding board’ around the perimeter of the fair, reflecting back and concentrating the atmosphere. With nearly 200 of these machines in the UK, we are now the Miami capital of the world.
Ian Trowell, National Fairground Archive
The Ghost Train (Frisson)
William Belson’s Ghost Train
Darkness and surprise are the simple ingredients for fear. The early shows, before Ghost Train rides, were bathed in darkness, a flick of the night revealing Pepper’s Ghost or some other such illusion. The mind plays tricks on you, and you imagine you saw something far worse than you actually did, bracing yourself mentally for the next glimpse of horror or mystery. The Ghost Train became a natural successor to the dark show, the frontage of the ride acting as a gallery of grotesque art and figures. The unparalleled beauty and sophistication of riding a classic steam train is tempered by images of skeletons dressed as railwaymen beckoning you through the swing door opening, painted brickwork mimicking a railway tunnel. Inside the doors swing shut and you instantly switch to another world, fired by your imagination - brief glimpses of horror, shrieks, whistles and blasts of air, and those dangly things that caress your face… so you can’t just close your eyes.
Ian Trowell, National Fairground Archive
Booster (Excitement)
George Irvin’s Booster
Propeller-based rides emerged after the World War II, evolving from flight training devices developed by pioneers such as Lee Ulrich Eyerly in Oregon (USA). Not for the faint-hearted, early versions such as the Dive Bomber and Loop-o-plane proved on the borders of what the average fair-going punter would pluck up courage to ride. With the recent rise of thrill rides and a sudden insatiable desire to be thrown in every direction, the propeller ride re-emerged around the Millennium. The Booster is the quantum leap in this genre, huge to behold and gruelling to experience. Developed in Italy and Holland, the Booster pushes towards 50 metres in height, with plans to go higher and faster. Circular motion approaches 80 mph, with g-forces coming in at 4.3, combining along the length of the body and through the ‘front to back’ as the seating gondola spins on its own axis. Riding this in the wind, or at night, is a fearful proposition, the pinnacle of thrill, taking the g-forces close to the body ‘shut-down’ criteria.
Ian Trowell, National Fairground Archive
‘My family have known for over 100 years that the public love to be terrified on funfair rides, but I will be the first Irvin ever to know, scientifically, why they enjoy it so much!’
George Irvin, Irvin Leisure
The Dana Centre would like to thank Equator (Nottingham University, Bristol University and University College London) and Health-Smart for their collaboration in producing the Telemetry Experiments.