The Attraction

The Ship is the mechanical heart of the experience and its most ambitious engineering challenge. Players board a 9-foot circular room (a black, inky void lined with curved seating, oval LED screens overhead, and embedded trackballs) and are slowly rotated to three different destination rooms before being returned to the start. The rotation is nearly imperceptible as players are bombarded with vibration and sound, creating a fantastic reveal at each new world encountered.

The platform sits on a mechanized turntable driven by a three-phase motor through a chain-and-sprocket drivetrain. A Lovejoy RT27 flexible coupling isolates motor vibration from the platform structure, and a custom chain tensioning system maintains consistent drive engagement around the 9-foot base ring. Subwoofers mounted below the floor deliver animations meant to mask the movement of the ship.

Positioning is handled by a redundant dual-sensor system: inductive sensors around the exterior of the base ring provide coarse positional reference for macro navigation between rooms, while IR sensors around the top of the platform provide fine correction data for precise door alignment. The two sensor types cross-check each other continuously, allowing the control system to make micro-corrections and guarantee that automated doors align perfectly at every stop, every time, through years of use.

Human presence in the seats is detected via a redundant combination of IR distance sensors and IR heat sensors embedded invisibly beneath the seat surfaces. The control system will not initiate rotation unless all players are seated. Trackballs integrated between the seats give players interactive agency with Unity games on the overhead screens during travel. The Ship is controlled by Arduino Megas and Raspberry Pis coordinating motor control, sensor polling, door actuation, lighting, video, and audio across the full rotation sequence. Alienware controls the Unity games.

The hexagonal puzzle chamber deploys a technique that multiplies the information density of a single painted environment by a factor of three: the walls are painted in a deliberate tri-color overlapping pattern, with each layer of the design mapped precisely to a single primary color (red, green, or blue).

When the room is flooded with red light, only the red-layer pattern is visible; the green and blue layers disappear into the background. Switch to green, and an entirely different design emerges. Switch to blue, and a third. Players experience what feels like three distinct visual environments within the same physical space.

This is directly integrated with gameplay: players use a rotating “gate” at the center of the room to navigate a honeycomb maze. LIDAR embedded in corner columns allows determination of player position, a mechanism used in kinetic games within. The environmental lighting is driven by addressable RGB fixtures controlled in sync with the game state machine: color transitions are triggered by puzzle events, not manually by a game host.

Players begin and end their experience in the same space, but entirely different rooms. What opens the experience as an elegant Victorian parlor, complete with ornate pressed-tin ceiling tiles, red velvet drapes, Persian rugs, and warm candlelight, becomes The Cage: a dark, cavernous trap, with the walls swung closed to seal every exit.

The ceiling transformation is the mechanical centerpiece. A hinged ceiling section is actuated by an electric winch, raising it upward and out of the parlor’s sightline to reveal the cavernous space above. The winch stops automatically in both positions via redundant limit switches, requiring the game host only to flip a single switch. The decorative pressed-tin tiles are continuous across the hinged section, completely concealing the hinge line in both configurations.

Simultaneously, two wall sections swing outward to transform the room seamlessly into an ominous Cage. A hidden door in one wall provides safety egress at all times, invisible from inside The Cage.

The full reset (ceiling lowered, walls swung back open, rug rolled out) is designed to complete in under 30 seconds. The winch handles the ceiling autonomously while the host attends to the walls and rug, making the parallel workflow achievable solo within the window. Players re-emerge into the space in an impossibly short amount of time to the room they first encountered, all traces of The Cage magically vanished.