USA - At its Spring 2024 opening, Flyover in Chicago became the newest of Flyover Attractions’ immersive indoor flying rides, joining existing installations in Las Vegas; Vancouver, Canada; and Reykjavik, Iceland.
Located within Chicago’s landmark waterfront Navy Pier, the multi-sensory experience, which incorporates leading drone technologies along with impressive aerial shots and first-person narratives, showcases the city from perspectives never seen before. Flyover’s signature Chicago journey is shown on an impressive 65ft spherical screen with flight motion seats engineered to swoop, dip and turn, giving guests the feeling of flight. The attraction transports 61 guests at a time, with complete sensory immersion using wind, mist and scents, as fliers hang suspended.
The ride employs a massive number of audio sources, which are controlled and dynamically spatialized by the advanced audio object and Wave Field Synthesis features of FLUX:: SPAT Revolution immersive audio software, then played through a highly customized system of JBL loudspeakers in a nearly spherical configuration. The FLUX:: software and JBL Professional loudspeakers are supplemented with Crown amplifiers, BSS loudspeaker processing, and control systems from Harman Professional, who also supplied extensive support and expertise to the project.
An extensive presentation occurs primarily in its own immersive theatre, which features a 10ft diameter, circular ‘lollipop’ screen in the centre (serving guests on both sides), plus an elliptical screen wrapping 360 degrees around the audience. Sound designer/mixer Tim Archer of Masters Digital programmed SPAT Revolution to control the soundtrack, which plays through a system designed by Wels, Austria-based Kraftwerk Living Technologies (KLT), who also designed the main flight ride audio system.
Speakers are placed behind the perforated screens, with each side of the venue featuring the same speaker configuration: eight JBL COL800 column loudspeakers inside the lollipop facing out (for a total of 16 cabinets), and six JBL AC18/26 compact two-way loudspeakers behind the wraparound screen (for a total of 12). Low-frequency support is provided by four ceiling-mounted JBL ASB6115 subwoofers.
Crucially, these are not arrays in which every loudspeaker receives the same signal; SPAT Revolution sends a discrete signal to each loudspeaker in order to implement Wave Field Synthesis and other reproduction techniques. Still, a source such as dialogue may need a large contribution of speakers for coverage or perceived sound size reasons, a situation which can create its own problems.
“When you've got eight speakers that are not in a simple array and all are receiving the same content, how do you get away with not having comb filtering?” asks Archer. “The answer is that you run the signal through SPAT. I pop one track of dialogue into SPAT and WFS spreads it across the eight columns. And you can be almost around the side of the lollipop before you lose the character of the sound; it's extremely wide. WFS is killer. It's a game changer.”
A ring of 10 more AC18/26s mounted above the audience (five on each side of the room) acts as the primary source for presenting the music from composer Elliott Wheeler.
For the flight ride, guests are seated on one of three separate moving platforms which are vertically “stacked” in the room. Presenting realistic, well-balanced sound to every guest was the biggest challenge facing both Archer and KLT’s Philipp Hartl, responsible for Sales/Lead Audio System Design & Optimisation.
“There are three platforms, and that's critical. We're talking about people above, in the middle, and below,” reveals Archer. “That is probably the main thing that makes this mix so unique: traditionally, we are all based in the idea that the person mixing is on the same plane as the rest of the audience. You normally don't have people located on three different planes.
In his sound system design, Hartl faced the issue of trying to supply sound appropriately to three continuously moving platforms. “As a practical matter, it’s not possible to achieve the exact same coverage at every seat on each platform,” Hartl explains, “so one of the really tricky things was to find a middle way to tune the speakers that minimized the amount of compromise made at any individual seat.”
Hartl used 34 JBL AM7215-series high power two-way loudspeakers, deployed in four different vertical layers, plus four JBL ASB7128 dual 18-inch subwoofers to furnish prodigious amounts of low-frequency effects. As in the pre-show theatre, SPAT Revolution rendered a different signal feed for each loudspeaker. To ensure clear rear localization, a pair of JBL Control 23-1 ultracompact speakers is mounted on each seat back.
Once the content was generated and the system tuned, the presentation was implemented in a show control system for playback by Miami-based Smart Monkeys.
