Augmenting Amusement Rides with Telemetry

In Augmenting amusement rides with telemetry, the authors present a system that uses wireless telemetry to enhance the experience of fairground and theme park amusement rides. The appealing aspect of this work consists in capturing data of people experience and subsequently visualizing it back to the audience and experts in medical monitoring, psychology and ride design. The analysis and visualization of these records provide five main possibilities to enhance the user experience:

1. enabling designers to understand at precisely which moments riders feel the most thrill and also how different people react to different rides, supporting the more systematic design of more thrilling rides.
2. design future rides that directly adapt to individual riders’ preferences or past history, for example tuning their movements in response to telemetry data, providing a more personalized riding experience than is currently possible.
3. enabling amusement rides to be reliably rated for the experience they deliver.
4. extending the spectator experience to include ‘tele-riding’ through a more immersive presentation of the telemetry data.
5. producing richer souvenirs

Walker, B., Schnädelbach, H., Egglestone, S. R., Clark, A., Orbach, T., Wright, M., Ng, K. H., French, A., Rodden, T., and Benford, S. (2007). Augmenting amusement rides with telemetry. In ACE ’07: Proceedings of the international conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology, pages 115–122, New York, NY, USA. ACM.

Via Nicolas’ From telemetry in trace park to the usage of urban (digital) traces.

Relation to my thesis: This is a very nice example of leveraging digital footprints (e.g. telemetric data) to enhance the user experience. The possibilities reflect well some of the thoughts on “feedback loop” or “control loop” discussed previously and on social navigation suggested in Leveraging Urban Digital Footprints with Social Navigation and Seamful Design. How can this successful approach be transplanted from a theme park into the city to enhance the residant/tourist experience?