Haunted Estate Dark Ride

experimentNo. 0060categoryRides & explorationrecordingpendingdataCC BY 4.0

The fly walks through a candlelit foyer and a stretching room, then boards a continuously moving clamshell vehicle on a theme-park dark ride, passing a Pepper's ghost ballroom illusion, an attic, a graveyard and a mirror crypt.

Setup

• 13 seekable stages over 182 seconds, from the foyer and stretching room through the endless hallway, séance circle, ballroom, attic, graveyard and mirror crypt to unload.
• A stretching-room control selects either preshow mechanism: a rising ceiling or a descending elevator floor.
• The ballroom ghosts are an optical Pepper's ghost: brightly lit figures hidden in a pit are reflected by a tilted, partially reflective glass pane with adjustable reflectance (default 0.04, range 0.02–0.2).
• Removing the glass makes the ballroom ghosts disappear for both the viewport and the eye camera.
• A rider-occupancy control sets the share of other vehicles carrying fly riders (default 70%).
• Seven cameras, including first-person, behind the riders, a Pepper's ghost section view and a roof-off view of the whole ride.

Measurement

• Retinal-only input: canonical eye images from the moving vehicle reach the fixed connectome model, and measured spikes drive the neural display.
• The eye camera looks through the same tilted glass, so the reflected figures reach the retina optically rather than as labels.
• Ride motion, boarding and all ghost-figure movement follow a pre-programmed timeline.

Limitations

• An original procedural, all-fly model based on the ride structure; no audio, names, scripts, logos or downloaded assets from the original attraction are used.
• Route, room sizes and timing are approximations.

Sources

• Haunted Mansion (Wikipedia)