Illustration by John MacNeill

The Ultimate Roller Coaster: Hang On for Your Life! (Forget Your Lunch)

By Jill Davis

“You are dangling like bait at the end of a 22-foot-long robotic arm, and it looks and feels exactly like you’re zooming through space. It’s tempting to gaze at distant planets, except that an asteroid as big as a house is hurtling toward you. Just before impact, you blast it with a phaser cannon while executing a series of buttery barrel rolls to avoid the debris.

This is the future of the roller coaster, as told by a jolly 46-year-old Brit named Gino De-Gol, founder of an unusual company called RoboCoaster. What fuels his ambitious vision is a belief that the all-American icon of thrill, circa 2005, is fundamentally a one-trick pony. “You are stuck on a track, you know exactly where you are going, and the ride is always the same,” De-Gol says in mock exasperation. What he has in mind is a hybrid ride, one that combines the high G-forces of today’s coasters, the computer-generated trickery of virtual-reality simulators and, eventually, the interactivity of videogames. Propelled through a snaking series of domed theaters, riders will swing far out into a computer-generated universe to come face-to-face with aliens, navigate a pulmonary artery or, if they’re so inclined, chase butterflies through the forest. [Read full article on Popsci.com]