SeaWorld Abu Dhabi is home to the world’s first 360-degree Dome Ride Theatre. Opened in May 2023, SeaWorld Abu Dhabi is the first SeaWorld park to exist outside of the United States. The Abu Dhabi-based asset management company Miral is the owner and operator of SeaWorld Abu Dhabi under license from SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment. As you would expect from the SeaWorld brand, and from any visitor attraction built in the Middle East in the last decade, the scale (it features the world's largest multi-species aquarium) and investment ($1.2bn) involved is huge.
Situated on Yas Island, it features eight marine environments, which are home to a series of immersive experiences and interactive exhibits, with more than 15 rides. One of those rides is Hypersphere 360, jointly developed by the Austrian systems integrator and visitor attraction specialist Attraktion and Intamin Amusement Rides (a manufacturer of amusement rides and attractions). It’s the first ever implementation of its patented Dome Ride Theatre product.
Spanning 17m in diameter, the spinning and tilting ride is within a fully covered LED sphere featuring 75 million pixels, providing an uninterrupted 360-degree view in any direction for each attendee. The ride allows visitors to explore the ocean’s depths and to swim through the world’s seas on a fully rotating and tilting ring, supporting the illusion the sphere is gliding through the seas.
For the delivery of Hypershere 360, Intamin was responsible for providing the mechanics of the seating ring, which can impressively rotate 360 degrees up to 6rpm and tilt 30 degrees in both directions. Attraktion is audio and the 5D (wind, scent, vibration, strobe and lighting FX) effects. What did the client Miral want to achieve with Hypersphere 360? Is it educational or purely for entertainment purposes or a mix of the two? “SeaWorld always has an educational message,” explains Beyr. “We told them from the beginning that animated content would make more sense in an environment like this. They wanted to have a stylised animation or real footage, but shooting video in the arctic is not really possible so that's why the content is all animated.” Like the other SeaWorld parks, the message is very much based on the educational element, for example the preservation of species and limiting the pollution of seas."
Visitors first encounter the Hypersphere 360 via a holding room, where LED screens introduce the story with a short video, showing a conversation between a computer guidance system (called Jules), and a robot character (named Verne, if you haven’t guessed the link already) which invites guests on a journey around the world to monitor endangered sea life. Visitors walk into the nearly 14-metre high structure of Hypersphere 360 via two ‘hidden’ doors in the mid-level (the reason why will be explained below) of the sphere. The show is four minutes long and can accommodate up to 1,000 visitors every hour. Once seated, and the safety checks have been completed, including the locking of lapbars in each one of the 80 seats, the show is triggered using Crestron touchpanels and the content is run on Brainsalt 2x6K video servers. Beyr describes how the show pans out for its excited attendees; “When the people enter the dome the full sphere isn’t revealed yet. The floor also acts as a railing when the people enter. The floor is actually on a hydraulic platform, your feet are hanging from the beginning, even when you sit down, like in a typical rollercoaster experience.” As soon the LED floor drops down it reveals the lower half of the LED dome. The ‘hidden’ doors described above are designed so the sphere can have perfect full 360-degree LED coverage, “When they close no seams are visible, so they are perfectly integrated,” explains Beyr.
Hypersphere's walls are surrounded by a giant (partly) transparent LED mesh in a large hexagon pattern, with an extra LED floor display at the base of the dome. The 4mm pixel pitch LED has been developed especially by Attraktion for the Dome Ride Theatre project. The pixel pitch was decided upon based on the viewing distance (1.5 metres) each visitor has from the screen in Hypersphere 360 at any one time. Why not just buy an off-the-shelf LED product to save time (and presumably money)? “It needed to be developed from scratch, we engineered it in-house which was a very long process, but we thought it's better to work with the factory directly and not having a brand in-between. Nobody has done a full indoor LED sphere before; we are inventing a new rocket.
People have created flying theatres, where parts of a dome move, but nobody has done this, with these dimensions, where the LEDs are inside,” says Beyr. The outer rim of the sphere is lined with 80 seats with small K-array Tornado-KT2 speakers built into the head rests, and scent atomisers, which spray the scent of the sea during the show, which are aimed towards them from the other side of the aisle, which runs around the circumference of the room. Each chair features four audio channels, stereo left and right with a front speaker and bass, this is alongside a further 16 audio channels additional in the sphere. Audio is further boosted by a combination of QSC’s DSPs and CX-Q amplifiers, with Martin Audio CDD12 speakers and SX118 and SX210 subwoofers placed behind the dome, alongside Anakonda-KAN200 speakers on floor.
