Peter's "Ride the Movies" Motion Theater

Hello everyone,

I'm building a motion theater and would love to get advice and feedback to make it as good as possible.

My name is Peter, and I'm a simulation artist. After leaving my CTO position at my own VR company, I started working on projects I'm passionate about rather than just what would please shareholders.

Upside: "Yay, freedom!" Downside: "With what money? What, you're just going to build stuff in your living room by yourself? That's crazy!"

So anyway, I'm building a simulator in my living room by myself with no money.

I've released a few small VR experiences, and while I love the medium, I find it's difficult to get people to try them in public. I started thinking about how the big theme parks do it, and I want to recreate that experience on a smaller scale, for one or two people.

So, I've started building the Mark 3 RTM simulator.





I've always loved Back To The Future: The Ride and am using it as my template. I'm going to create the entire adventure, including the preshow. Once that's done, I'll develop my own experience that I can take to conventions without worrying about cease and desist letters. (But make no mistake the RTM will be fully capable of running several now-defunct ride experiences when it’s safe to do so.)

I'll start at local events in Atlanta, like DragonCon and SFGE, and hopefully expand from there. But first, I need to make it work safely and reliably.

Thanks to Facebook Marketplace, I was able to trade for two amusement-level simulators (which I'll cover in another topic), and they came with extra noise-canceling "egg chairs" that are perfect for this.

Since I only need 2DOF, I plan to attach the chair to a car Ujoint along with two motors, as demonstrated in D Max's excellent video series on driving sims.



In the coming days, I'll post some CG mockups of what I have in mind, but I'd love to tap into the forum's experience on the best way to attach those motors to this chair.

Should they be on the plate where the universal joint and chair are bolted, or should they be higher up on the back of the egg?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Please feel free to ask questions, and I'll post more pictures and mockups as we go.

Excellent advice on both parts. I think I can manage the balancing issue. the chair has four bolts on it that will allow me to attach it to a plate with the Ujoint securely. I plan to build something similar to another forum user with holes for those bolts.



I should be able to hit the sweet spot with trial and error before we weld anything. To me, the tricky part will be figuring out where to attach the motors. As you said, I'm looking for compact and I'd love to do it to the plate itself but I don't know if that effects how beefy the motors would need to be. So current plan to attach to the back of the chair, higher up near the shoulders of the user inside unless you guys can suggest a better way.

I didn't know about the player! I'll be using that for testing for sure, but Unity is my wheelhouse so I may build my own. Even though this will be a passive experience I have plans for the user to select the route they will take before they board, programing in the options via RFID cards then riding out the results. I also plan to have multiple stand alone screens that may be easier to run from a central program. You can see an example of that in the BTTF prototype above.

On one hand, I'll already have that work done for my own ride so adding things like BTTF and Star Tours will be trivial. On the other it may get more adoption if I share it in a format you guys are already using. I'll have to put some thought into it once I get that far on the hardware side. Perhaps both is the answer.

You are correct that I'm building from scratch to avoid the weight and complexity of the amusement rides but the ones in my possession are interesting, they'll need their own thread for sure. One of them is stock, the way they come from the factory in China, the other was already modded to use the modern sim platforms.



What does that mean? I have no idea! I have not had them long and have not taken the time to crack it open and see what the previous owner did to make it work. All I know is he had a driving rig on top of that plywood and the computer he did that on is still inside.

I'm sure most people here will be dying for me to dive in, but I was already working on the RTM sim this thread is about on top of two other major projects and I really want to finish it first. The only reason I even mentioned them was to explain how I got the egg chair and. (I actually have two that are separate form these sims)

Now that I think about it, that's a good carrot! Help me build the RTM and I'll start work on these after. Hint, I'm pretty sure they rotate 360.

Thanks again! I'll be looking at the software side once I have some hardware to run. I've done some of this work before with a YawVR1, but I've forgotten that stuff and will be relearning how to get the motions. Luckily with movie rides it's a relatively simple process.

I've made a very crude version of how I picture the motor placement.



The way I see it, I just need to make sure it can handle the workload, get "beefy" enough parts.

Hi where dit you get youre screen?

Facebook marketplace has been MAGIC the last few months. I had to drive 600 miles round trip to get it in a rental van. Even with that it was only $200.

It's called the Cobra Venom 180. They still sell them but I got a bit stonewalled when I reached out to get more info.

https://www.est-kl.com/cobra180-venom/

I'm reverse engineering the specs based on brochures they've found. I'd share that but like.. someone would have to have one too, yeah?

The tricky part is replacing the mirror they use, that's a work in progress I should probably share here once my next test one comes in.

Spoke to my brother in Florida about the need for the center Ujoint and he's on board with fabricating the key part.



I made this quickly and it's not to scale, but I think shows what we have in mind. Since there are so many potential users and this is physically bigger than most seats, we want this to be beefy so he's going to source a car axle and weld that to two plates, again similar to this other build from the forums but larger.



Once I have this I can start on sourcing motors and whatnot.

Yes, you are of course correct. I worked that out soon after making that quick example. I'll have to update it soon to avoid confusion.

Here's the very rough, but closer to usable, rig.

Looking at other rigs I think i can make the motors attach a little lower, this is good because attaching them to the egg would be difficult.

As you can imagine it's going to take a while for family to source and weld the joints I need. In the meantime I've made progress on the screen.



Originally this "Cobra Venom 150" screen came with a topper that had a first surface convex mirror.

Below is some screenshots from a video showing off the device, I know it's hard to see but like, mirrors are like that, right?



Thanks to this video and some plans they posted, I was able to reverse engineer the specs and found that a large security mirror of 21x15 inches has the same dimensions and near correct warping.



Because of the crowdstrike issue I had to order this mirror FOUR times for one to arrive and it took 6 weeks but it is finally here and it works great!

Not being first surface is of course an issue but I'm overcoming it with the projectors I'm using having two lamps and a staggering 7000 lumens. (I have three another crazy good FB find)



This system allows me to get the screen coverage I need without buying the $350 lens for each projector. New options of multi projectors open up now, and eventually I can use just one 4K unit.

I tested it in a few ways but I think the one you guys will like is my first run-through of Borg Encounter 4D



Even without the motion I got a limited amount of immersion.

There's still a lot of work to do but I'm at a point where I'm confident it will work.

I think I might be ready to start gathering the hardware. I've done my best to learn from these forums but I'm shy to get anything without showing it to you guys first.





These tie rods look pretty good to me, what do you guys think?

Oh, guess I can't post links to amazon. These are $19.00 and that seems like a pretty good deal to me.

Wait, I may have everything I need already. The Yaw one has the drivers, motors, ect right? Maybe I can use those parts in this.

Wow, the more I browse this forum the more stunning projects I discover. I was at the Hollywood studios in 1998 and took a ride in the "back to the future" simulator. It was great back then. And now you have something like this in your living room!
The Cobra Venom dome display looks very interesting. I was already looking for something like this for the helicopter simulator I'm planning to build. In small planes you have the big motor block in front of the cockpit. So the view is somewhat limited, anyway, and three TV screens are perfectly enough for the windscreen and side windows. Same for large commercial aircrafts where the windows are rather small.
But small helicopters (T.C.s one from "Magnum", for example) often have glass domes. And the wider and taller the view is the better the immersion.

I am glad I have the cobra screen but they are HARD to find. I think the folks in this forum have created a good substitute with the curved MDF. Combine that with this mirror trick and you'll get the coverage you're looking for.

Come to think of it, maybe the folks here can help me figure out how to get a convex but first surface mirror. I've already done some testing with inversing the acrylic but the mylar can't be applied to the other side in anyway I know of.

Yes, the Cobra screens look very expensive. A true spheric shape is hard to make. It requires big and expensive achines and moulds. Maybe a spheric mirror can be purchased somewhere. Sometimes they are used as wide angle mirror so you can better watch the traffic when exiting a narrow garage access or for shop surveillance. But I fear at least the affordable ones are poor quality and have high distortion.

It might be woth trying out if a screen and mirror bent in only one direction would also work. This would create a part of a drum surface ("half pipe"). Mirror coated acrylic sheet should be available at reasonable price and quality. Bending it to a drum shape requires no heat. We could use CNC machined templates for the shape.

If i am correct this can directly done by fly elise software double cylinder

I've run a bunch of tests and the I'm starting to really understand the trades-offs to fill this screen.



This is using two identical projectors on two identical mirrors. Please note I have not bothered to do warp adjusting because I know for sure that will work and it was not needed for this test.

I've set this up in a way to maximize the pixel density. Previous tests use only one projector and a significant amount of pixels are lost to fill an entire screen. Only with blending 2 projectors can I get full coverage and a clear image.

This is all fine and good but now I have to worry about alignment on a constant basis. Since I plan to have this in public I think it's important that it be reliable once initial calibration is done and this is good looking at the the cost of that simplicity.

What I'm trying to say is I'm tired of trying to fiddle with this! I'm thinking of scrapping the kickass screen and replacing it with a curved TV.



There are serious advantages to do this this at the cost of FOV. It's more reliable, higher rez, and I can bring back in the per-user adjustment system I have in mind.

Plus, I would end up selling this screen, and I think some of the folks here would be interested.

What do you guys think? I feel like a lot of you have used projectors and screens could give me insight I have not earned myself yet.

I totally agree. The dome screen looks impressive but it takes a lot of effort and money to get it right and it's probably not worth the trouble for a home theatre. I also thought about using a dome display for my helicopter simulator project. But it wouldn't be possible to cover the full surface of the "glass bubble". In some helicopters you can see the ground behind the foot pedals. The dome display can't reach that far down even if it's 180° wide because the dashboard would create shadows.
So I think it's easier to implement this with multiple flat screen dispays even if this means I need 6 of them (windscreen, left&right windows, left&right foot area, instruments).
VR goggles would make everything simpler but have other disadvantages.