[MUSIC]
--I've never seen VR done at all, but yeah,
it was pretty cool to, like, look at how,
oh, you can see this part of the
track from this area, like when you're
going through this turn and such.
--I was just trying
to see what it would look like from a rider's
standpoint while I was in VR, what those elements that we
added look like. Might have disorientated
me a little bit, and yes, and messed with
my verbal skills, 'cause I'm still dizzy
right now!
it was disorienting but fun. It was a good
time. I enjoyed it. I liked seeing all of our,
like, meticulous placement of little things.
--When this class started it was a
paper-and-pencil course where we were doing kind of
hardcore kinetics, schematics, etc.,
using hand calculations, and we still do a
lot of that. But we've really progressed to
take advantage of some of the technologies that are
coming out, and that includes software packages,
essentially CAD packages, if you will.
They're specifically designed for roller
coasters, used in industry, and our
students can approach and use them here.
And then more recently, we've taken advantage
of things like virtual reality. So
students can actually prototype their
designs in the CAD package, then
hop on the rides in a virtual reality
environment to actually see what the
look and feel would actually be like, make
small design changes based on their
their own feedback and perception of
what they're seeing. So obviously we can't
build full-scale rides at the cost of
millions of dollars here on campus.
But what we can do is build them in a virtual
environment and really work out the kinks
and make the best rides we possibly can.
Like anything we design as practicing
engineers, you know, you gotta have form
and functionality. And I think, you know,
we often under-emphasize some of the, you know,
the marketing aspects, some of the
product design aspects. And I think this
is a great opportunity to talk about
something that a vast majority of students
have experienced, and think about how they
would present their own ideas, wrap their own
ideas, and still have very strong underlying
fundamentals, but really leverage the
creativity that many of these students have.
--I really want to be an Imagineer for
Disney. But that's, you know, like a crazy goal
that is almost impossible to do.
But it would be a lot of fun. And it
definitely is a good way to kind of look
behind the scenes of rides and such.
Because, you know, you always see like the
front of it, and it's cool to think about how it's made.
--This was something that enough students seem
to have an interest in, that it'd be a fun way to
teach core concepts, but do it from an
applications-first perspective. And in
some sense that allowed us, I think, to
take off the limits of what we would
normally cover in that course, and do a
lot more complex things. And I think back
and, you know, the vast majority of the
students did one of two things: they either
went on to graduate school, or they
went on to work in the theme park
industry. Looking back as an instructor, I
don't think there's much more you could
ask for than people that really took the
opportunity they had in this class and
used it to extend their opportunity to
learn, or to really take their skills and
apply it in the field.
