Recently, traditional playground games have been revamped by high-tech technology through Walt Disney's fantasy project. Disney's “Toy Story Midway Mania†was opened at Disney’s California Adventure Park and Disney World. The ride has innovative shooting and throwing games that can still be held in carnivals and walks across the country. You will win plush animal toys for you in the casino.
"Toy Story Crazy Playground" is one of Disney's latest attractions. It combines traditional riding mechanisms with complex 3-D game systems to innovate the performance and feel of Carnival Playground games.
However, the innovative game no longer appears on the Fiesta site, but in the 3-D game environment designed by Walt Disney fantasy engineers with the help of Pixar Automation Studios. In the Midway Mania game, there are no actual items that need to be thrown or fired at the target, no ferrules, no darts, and no airsoft guns to aim at the ducks made of sheet metal.
Instead, game participants first pass by an animated electronic character, Mr. Potato Head, who is a recruiter for the playground. His voice and comical features come from actor Don Rickles. Then, they would take a pair of 3-D glasses and jump into the rotating riding vehicle, which will bring them into a series of virtual games. Instead of the throwing pie game for practice, Midway Mania includes a total of 5 scoring games, each related to a different character in the movie Toy Story.
Once parked in front of an individual's game, participants in the game must shoot a gun in their hand to shoot at the projectile on the big screen. The game scores all participants through the value of the target points they fired. It even rewards virtual plush toys and displays the rewarded toys on the computer screen of the vehicle.
Although the game is already three-dimensional, fantasy engineers have added another dimension to the game. The ride has special effects that allow the game to produce realistic effects. For example, if you throw a virtual dart at a virtual balloon and your balloon bursts, your face will be blown by a gust of wind or sprayed with water. Chrissie Allen, senior producer and director of the amusement project, said that these effects add a fourth-dimensional experience to riding games. "The game world completely surrounds you," she said.
The entire immersive game may be a carnival for the player, and sometimes it is almost true. Midway Mania has a rigorous side to making these fun and games a reality. According to Jody Gerstner, executive director of performance and ride control at the Walt Disney Fantasy Project, the attraction is based on Disney's most advanced automation system to date. The system is based on the use of components provided by one of the company's partners, Siemens Energy & Automation, which is Disney's first use of Industrial Ethernet in ride control applications. "We used to have performance control on Ethernet before, but then we didn't let players move around," Gerstner said.
The automation system also has new breakthroughs in other areas. One is its scale breakthrough. "This is the largest system we have ever made. The largest one is not the geographic area but the number of controlled areas," Gerstner said. Another is the need to perform an integrated workload for weaving unique games, driving and performance elements in an amusement project into a natural and smooth user experience. And, this amusement project is how to intelligently use positioning sensors and software in the motion control system to occupy some wonderful examples of mechanical idleness.
Talk to imaginary engineers such as Gerstner or Allen and you will soon find that they are very much troubled by the entertainment value of the driving controls they create. In this sense, fantasy engineering is not much different from industrial mechanical engineering. After all, when will someone have to design a filling and sealing machine for entertainment?
However, like all engineers, fantasy engineers also need to achieve hard engineering goals related to safety, productivity, uptime and installation costs. And to achieve all of these goals in the project requires a control technology that appeals to plant machinery designers rather than theme park designers.
Fun with Ethernet One of the key elements of the Midway Mania gaming experience is the string-operated shooting gun on each rider.
A variety of positioning data streams and software algorithms continuously determine the actual position of the firing gun associated with the game screen.
The decisive control system in the Midway Mania Playground actually contains three subsystems for riding vehicles, games and performance elements. Ethernet is a common thread that connects all these things together.
Two types of industrial controllers are used in the travel control system for controlling the ride of a riding vehicle in a playground. The central roadside controller, which is a Siemens 319 PLC, manages the flow of vehicles in amusement games. Gerstner said: "Roadside controllers are traffic policemen. Each vehicle also has an on-board controller, which is a Siemens 315 PLC, to handle programmed speed parameters, positioning data from sensors, safety measures and fault diagnosis."
For vehicles traveling in amusement games, the onboard controller communicates wirelessly with the central controller on the roadside through ProfiNet RT. Then, the signals generated by the central controller are transmitted to a 397 bus bar area on the rails of the vehicle through a hard-wired network with independent intellectual property rights. This signal is then transmitted back to the individual vehicle via a brush pole shoe connected to the busbar. Gerstner calls this control the "stop PWM signal." It tells whether each car is allowed to advance at the set speed, whether it should stop or whether it should slow down.
The game control also has a central control element and an onboard component. A PC-based central game controller transfers game data from each rider to a group of computers running all game software. Midway Mania’s large-scale computer room houses a total of more than 150 computers, including 56 HP Windows XP PCs targeting 56 game displays in the amusement program. Each on-board controller is used to process its own game information, such as shooting gun position information and on-board score display.
Just like the driving control, the central game system and the on-board game system communicate via wireless Ethernet, and share the use of vehicle-mounted wireless devices with the driving control system. The physical connection between game computers is achieved through a standard 100 Mbit/s Ethernet network. Only the data exchange in the main game controller is done through a G backbone network.
Both the ride control system and the game control system use a wireless connection to obtain data from the vehicle. On the vehicle, Siemens SCALENCE W access point modules connected to the outside SCALENCE W access point module of the vehicle through the leaky coaxial cable along the track are shared. Olaf Scheel, a Siemens engineer who works for the Midway Mania design team, said that in order to prevent any intrusion or any denial of service attacks, the designer “hardened†the wireless system. He explained that "on the travel control system, security is guaranteed through wireless communications in a one-way nature. On-board controllers only send data. They can only get hard-line traffic signals."
In addition to ride control and game control, the system has other PCs for performance control, including several computers that implement game-specific effects. These computers are also on some nodes on standard Ethernet networks.
Working Together <br> Breaking it down, each of Midway Mania's control systems is very simple, but their collaborative work is the key to determining the success of the game. "The most difficult part of the project at that time was defining the software interface between games, driving and performance control," Gerstner said, all three systems must work together closely to create a natural and smooth user experience.
For example, game control systems and ride control systems work together from beginning to end. In normal operation, the game controller needs to know where the driving control parks the game-related vehicle. This task is actually more complicated than it sounds. According to Gerstner, the electric motors that drive the vehicle, the right-angle gearboxes, and the pinch rollers all play a role, as well as mechanical brakes that park the vehicle in front of the screen. "We must find ways to compensate for the inherent deviations in mechanical systems," he said.
Game control and driving controls also have a co-response device for stagnation or delay. The delay or delay may be due to someone having touched one of the ride's pressure-based safety devices or even deceleration during vehicle loading. . Gerstner said: "We know there is stagnation, but the system can do the right thing even if everything is not perfect." The correct thing to say includes controlling the game order, such as when the player stays in front of a screen. Too long to add an extra practice round; also includes more dramatic responses, such as voice prompts given by characters in Toy Story.
This is Mr. Potato Head, a mechatronics character whose voice is from actor Don Rickles. His job is a playground recruiter.
Its robot arm and custom control system let him lick his ears.
Many of these collaborative efforts require driving and game control to utilize positioning data from two complementary tracking methods. The first method is to use Pepperl+Fuchs's binary proximity sensor to obtain a series of absolute position markers distributed in the strategic positions of the track. Four such sensors are installed under each riding vehicle. These sensors can tell us where each vehicle is indoors, "Gerstner said.
While proximity sensor tracking is critical to generating a "stop signal" and controlling the flow of multiple vehicles, it lacks the resolving power required by the vehicle to correspond to the game screen. So, fantasy engineers have added a tracking system that can determine the position of the vehicle within one inch. It uses a laser sensor from Banner, which is also installed underneath the vehicle to read the scale bar near the parking space set for each game. This fine positioning system can help compensate for all inherent deviations of the mechanical system. "The game doesn't care whether or not the vehicle is parked in the same place every time. It just needs to know where each car actually stops, and it can make up," Gerstner said.
Positioning data also plays a very important role in determining the position of the shooting gun associated with the game. An algorithm in the game software uses the data from the three encoders on the firing gun and another encoder that measures the amount of rotation on the turret of the riding vehicle to determine the position. "The turret swivel was mounted on the rotating shaft of the gun," Gerstner said. The firing gun location algorithm also considers the actual stopping position of the vehicle. Gerstner described this positioning algorithm as "very complex", but he added that although this algorithm is still more reasonable than using a separate sensing system. "Using the available data, we have enough mathematical accuracy to determine the position of the firing gun," he said.
A new method
The Midway Mania ride control system embodies several important differences with Disney's traditional design of a large control system approach. Gerstner pointed out that in the past Disney's large-scale amusement projects generally used point-to-point I/O. This design method can be clearly seen from the area reserved for the I/O bay, which is located in a room adjacent to the Midway Mania large computer room.
However, most of the control room is still empty because the driving control only occupies two compartments. Gerstner attributed most of the space savings of the control system to Siemens' distributed I/O and the Ethernet backbone that connects all the control systems together. "Ethernet simplifies wiring and saves all related contact manpower," he said. "To be honest, if we use traditional architecture, I don't know if we can complete this project. It will use a lot of copper."
Another difference for Disney is the use of central controllers in this type of amusement program. In previous ride control using similarly spaced busbars, such as the Rocket Rod, Disney had to spread the controller around driving controls. Gerstner said: "Because of the processing difficulties, we can not set up a central controller and can not transmit the allowed signals to all regions. Siemens' 319 PLC controller has the speed and ability to overcome this problem. This is really a great thing."
In fact, the central PLC controller and ProfiNet RT control network have more processing power and speed than the application needs. Scheel said that the central PLC controller was able to scan and execute all 397 convergence zone codes within 32 milliseconds. “We can also be faster, if not needed, but it is not necessary,†he said. “If necessary, ProfiNet RT can be updated every millisecond. This is also true of PCs and Ethernet used in gaming systems. Gerstner believes that The bandwidth is redundant, and the bandwidth usage of the switch is only about 10% at any time.†The thing with bandwidth is that when a project starts, you never know how much bandwidth you need. Therefore, it is always better to have more points than to have fewer points. "He said.
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