The Techiest Place on Earth?

Beneath the leaky pipes, creaky wooden slats and corrugated tin walls of Disney’s newest theme park, California Adventure, lies a hidden world of technology.

The Disney designers built the park to look like a piece of old-time California. But its real heart is closer to the state’s modern persona as a center of the aerospace and computer industries.

Though there are plenty of amusement parks with faster, scarier, more technologically glitzy rides, most rely on the same science deployed in California Adventure--from the linear induction motors driving the park’s signature roller coaster to the flight-simulation technology behind a virtual hang-gliding ride over state landmarks.

Many of those gears, however, grind away largely unnoticed by park visitors. And that’s how Disney likes it.

“It’s the art of invisible engineering,” said Mark Sumner, Walt Disney Imagineering’s technical director of ride mechanical engineering. “If our guests thought about how this was done as opposed to being immersed in that experience, we haven’t done our jobs.”

Take, for example, the induction motor system that powers the California Screamin’ roller coaster. As it turns out, the ride is choreographed by equipment ensconced deep beneath the ground in a concrete, earthquake-proof, climate-controlled bunker that few visitors will ever get to see.

At the beginning of the ride, cars catapult like cannonballs--zooming from a dead stop to 55 mph in four seconds--on sheer electromagnetic force generated by 5,000-amp motors. The motors create traveling magnetic waves that thrust the vehicle forward in the same way that a surfer would ride along an ocean wave.

The cars don’t actually touch the motors; rather they glide along the magnetic fields.

“Roller coasters are like soapbox derby cars,” explained Don Hilsen, executive technical director of Walt Disney Imagineering. “The heavier the cars, the faster they go. But at the end of the ride, all the cars have to enter the station at exactly the same speed. So we needed a way to fine-tune the speed so that fully loaded cars weighing 22,000 pounds come in at the same speed as empty trains. We do that with the linear induction motor, which operates bi-directionally.”

As each train passes along key points along the track, sensors gauge its speed and adjust the electromagnetic force to either speed it up or slow it down. The technology is similar to that of high-speed magnetic levitation trains.

At the start of the ride is another technological trick--the wave machine. Disney designers wanted to create a believable set of waves that crash onto the sides of the trains as they queue up for the catapult.

What they came up with was a set of computer-controlled paddles that push water back and forth. The pneumatically activated paddles resemble a piano keyboard turned on its side to create wavelets that build up until they crescendo into a set of large waves, right as the trains arrive.

To figure out how much pressure to exert, each paddle has the ability to measure the force of the wave coming back so it can calculate its next push. Engineers determined that the “harmonics” of the man-made lagoon generally required five pushes to create one large set of waves.

But the main attraction remains the ride itself. With more than 6,000 feet of track, the four-minute ride is the world’s longest steel looping roller coaster, and about twice as long as the average coaster, said Rick Turner, regional representative for the American Coaster Enthusiast, a volunteer club of 6,000 coaster fans worldwide.

What excites Turner is the wistful design of the coaster, which sits at the center of the park’s Paradise Pier section.

“When I first saw Paradise Pier, I wanted to drop to my knees and cry,” Turner said. “It’s state-of-the art. And yet it captures the best of anything that ever was. It has the flavor, the feel and the ambience of what those old parks must have been like.”

Across the park sits another of California Adventure’s signature rides--the Soarin’ Over California flight simulator.

Viewers are hoisted into an 80-foot-diameter Imax dome, their feet dangling free above the screen, as they watch high-resolution movies projected at 48 frames per second--twice the rate of normal Imax films. The movies were shot from helicopters zooming above California’s scenic hot spots, including Napa Valley, Yosemite Falls, Golden Gate Bridge and Malibu.

The seats, made with the same fabric used in those fancy Aeron office chairs, tilt and veer along with the film to give viewers the sensation of flying, much like the Star Tours ride at Disneyland. Except Soarin’ has a much larger screen that literally surrounds dangling viewers. In addition, the seats for Soarin’ move just two directions at once--called degrees of freedom in engineering parlance--during the ride once they’re hoisted into position, while Star Tours seats move as many as six directions at once. The reason: The Imax film was so realistic that engineers found it didn’t take much to get people to experience the sensation of flying.

Despite all that, the ride was first represented in three-dimensional format on a 1950s Erector set that Sumner found in his attic.

“Once we decided where people should be, we had to figure out how to get them there,” Sumner explained. “Our challenge was in loading up and hoisting people into position most efficiently.”

After discarding several possibilities, Sumner thought about the problem over a Thanksgiving weekend four years ago and came up with an idea. He could see the system in his mind, but he couldn’t exactly describe it or sketch it properly.

“I wanted to be able to show it,” he said. “So I had this idea to build it out of my old Erector set. What we ended up with today is about 99% of what we saw in this Erector set.”

Three sets of seats each weighing 38 tons when fully loaded are hoisted into place with what amounts to a high-powered horizontal elevator. The “elevators” maneuver the rows of seats up and out into the screen, with each row able to move independently.

The Imax dome, which is inverted compared with most Imax domes, has reinforced metal panels at the bottom of the screen, just in case riders drop a shoe or cell phone.

Next stop for most park visitors is Grizzly River Run, a free-flowing water rafting ride. Although rides like this reside in almost every theme park, Grizzly River Run features a twist--literally.

Designers wanted to give riders the experience of spinning down a spiral waterfall. But the friction in early designs proved too high, and the rafts tended to get stuck. So they came up with a way to drop the raft down a steep ramp as it spins. As the raft careens toward the edge, it is “pinched” on opposite sides of the chute. One side is made of high-friction rubber, and the other has low-friction rollers. The raft spurts out of the chute spinning like a top.

“Sometimes, it’s the simplest things that work best,” said Sumner, adding that Disney has patented the spin mechanism.

The ride requires 120,000 gallons of water to be pumped every minute. At that rate, one could fill up a backyard swimming pool in 15 seconds.

And the reservoir of water for the ride is actually located clear across the park, adjacent to Paradise Pier. So if you notice a “tidal basin” next to the pier with water rising and receding, it’s really water being used for the raft ride. The water is funneled through underground tunnels that are 14 feet wide, 8 feet tall and 300 feet long.

That’s large enough to drive two pickup trucks side by side.

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Times staff writer Alex Pham covers technology.

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The Science Behind the Disney Magic

A look at the technology behind the three biggest rides at Disney’s new theme park--the Soarin’ Over California flight simulator, the Grizzly River Run raft ride and the California Screamin’ roller coaster. How the rides work:

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Sources: Don Hilsen, Walt Disney Imagineering; Intellectual Property Network; “The Way Things Work” by David MacAulay

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Graphics reporting by BRADY MacDONALD and RAOUL RANOA / Los Angeles Times

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MAKING WAVES

Pnuematic paddles create wave action in Paradise Lagoon at the new California Adventure theme park. How the system works:

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Source: Don Hilsen, Walt Disney Imagineering

Graphics reporting by BRADY MacDONALD