Opening earlier this year, Flyover in Chicago became the newest of Flyover Attractions’ immersive indoor flying rides, joining existing installations in Las Vegas; Vancouver, Canada; and Reykjavik, Iceland, that transports guests to the planet’s most epic places through flying journeys.
Located within Chicago’s waterfront Navy Pier, the multi-sensory experience, which incorporates drone technologies along with aerial shots and first-person narratives, showcases the city from perspectives never seen before. Flyover’s signature Chicago journey is shown on an 65-foot 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 number of audio sources, which are controlled and dynamically spatialised by the advanced audio object and Wave Field Synthesis features of FLUX:: SPAT Revolution immersive audio software, then played through a 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 10-foot diameter, circular “lollipop” screen in the center (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, 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.
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.
With the platforms in constant motion, object audio was the only way to place a source and have each person hear it properly. Two guests viewing the same visual element from different platforms need separate mixes that accurately localize the sound for their positions, while the platforms continue to move. Traditional multichannel mixes simply cannot accomplish this. For this reason, localization in SPAT Revolution is not viewed in terms of routing sounds into loudspeakers, but, rather, sending them to “pan points” or virtual speakers to synthesize artificial wavefronts.
The technicians 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.