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  Back to the Future ka
 

The Back to the Future attraction is based on the comedic science fiction adventure film written by Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis. Guests are seated in replicas of the DeLorean car featured in the film and are blasted into the past to chase the villain, Biff Tannen, in his stolen DeLorean time machine. Along the way they encounter avalanches, dinosaurs, and a molten lava volcano as they hurtle through time and space before returning to the present. To create the illusion of flying, designer Peter Alexander invented a flexible motion base simulator to support the individual ride vehicles, and enclosed the entire ride under two eighty foot diameter Omnimax domes to enhance the immersive experience.

MLA did both the acoustics and audio design on the project. The film projectors were quite noisy and required a concrete enclosure and specially designed baffle for the lens. The Omnimax films were projected on hemispherical perforated metal screens, which were acoustically transparent. This allowed the absorptive treatment and the main loudspeaker systems to be located outside the domes in strategic locations to follow the action sequences in the movie. There were also loudspeakers on either side of the vehicle, where it rises up into the dome, and others within the vehicle itself. To test the system a motion base was shipped to Vancouver, Canada where there was an Omnimax theater built for the World Expo in 1986. Preliminary motion base programming and sound systems could be checked out in a clean environment before the final construction in Orlando.

Theme Design vs. Architecture by Peter Alexander