Ballast takes the most familiar parts of a waterpark and drops guests into something awe-inspiring. As the experience designer, I built the stories and environments that make it happen.
Building around the track
Ballast makes waterproof VR headsets for waterparks. Guests wear them riding down a water slide, floating face-down in a pool or on a DIVR+ rig that sends bubbles rushing past to feel like fast underwater movement.
Ballast engineered the hardware and the sensors that sync each headset to its place on the slide. Working from the waterparks' 3D models of each slide, our team built a system for turning them into tracks in Unity, which we then built the story worlds around. Through trial and error, we learned how far we could play with the angles of drops and curves to win as much real estate as possible for the jungle, space and sky environments. It worked a lot like designing a dark ride: a fixed track, with the environment, timing and story built around it.
VR slide worlds
I built worlds for VR slide installs at Kokpunkten Actionbad in Sweden, Vana Nava Water Jungle in Thailand and Kalahari Resorts in the US. The worlds I built ranged from a calm, cute sky world to a medieval battle world with a fire-breathing dragon. Slide rides are short and fast, so designing them is similar to designing a rollercoaster.
A lot of my inspiration came from rides like Disneyland's Matterhorn. As you whip around the mountain, the suspense builds: warning signs, broken tracks, evidence of hikers who didn't make it. Then you finally lay eyes on the yeti himself. I designed the same way. Each story is embedded in quick glances that have to land immediately, building anticipation toward a big moment timed to the slide's biggest drop or turn: the alien mothership appearing, a cheetah suddenly in view, or, in calmer worlds like the sky world, simply the vista opening up.
DIVR Ocean II
DIVR experiences are longer and story-driven, and I got to pitch my own. In Ocean II, guests float down into deep water and find a baby whale caught in rope at a shipwreck, with sharks closing in. She breaks free at the last moment, and you follow her through a coral reef and down into a kelp forest where more sharks lurk.
Just as she reaches open water, her family of massive whales swoops down around you both, and the mother looks you in the eye. I storyboarded it, mapped it beat by beat and built and animated it in Unity.
DIVR+ Dragon
DIVR+ turns a pool into a thrill ride. Guests float face-down and hold onto a rig at the pool's edge that blasts water jets and bubbles past them, so flying fast through a world feels real. I pitched and built Dragon as its launch title.
It's based on the Chinese legend of carp that swim up the Yellow River and leap the falls at the Dragon Gate to become dragons. You fly high above cliffs with birds alongside, dive down to skim the river among jumping koi, then become one of them, soaring up a massive waterfall into a magical tunnel where you and the koi transform into dragons.
