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The Way Things Work

1999 (David Carroll Associates)

This project was built like a Disney attraction, based on the David Macaulay book. It had moving props and show sound and lights, and as a part of a public space it had to conform to the overall life safety requirements. Therefore wide area paging, fire alarm and emergency stop systems had to be incorporated and they had to be fail-safe. The show control system was Anitech. Audio routing was MediaMatrix.

We participated in a series of attraction integrator team meetings with the other integrators and Sony's attraction engineer, Mike Haimson who pulled the whole job together into a cohesive facility with common design standards and products.

Unfortunately, The Way Things Work didn't -- that is, it wasn't very popular, so the Metreon closed it within two years. The theater has been redesigned to act as a presentation theater for special functions and is still in operation.

Project Engineer: David Carroll
Installation supervisor: Steve Young, Nicholas Pinette
Anitech Programming: Steve Young
MediaMatrix Programming: David Carroll
Lead Installers: Luis Manuela, Frank Richter
Fab and Installation Crew: Ian Turner, Christopher Park, Karen Alvarado, Gina Rincon, Ginadi Vilisov, Erwan Illien, John Silliphant, Mikael Dynnikov, Robert Perry
Procurement/Logistics: Victor Tieku
Scope of Work: Audio Video Control systems design, fabrication, installation, testing, documentation.

Thanks to Mike Haimson for all the pictures! I never seem to get to the job site with a camera...

	The ROBOT: This was really Mike's baby. We just supported him in getting it put in. It was built in LA at the Sony Development shop but Mike replaced all the servo amps.		The Theater: 3-screen, video projection using doubled Sony micromirror projectors. The center screen was 3D so it had 4 projectors. Also in the theater were special effects projectors, mist, seat vibrators, lasers, etc.
	The control room. 3-1/2 pairs of Signal Transport swing racks were installed into custom seismic frames. The whole deal was underneath the projection platform.		The Theater source rack with theater power amplification. The Audio source is the Tascam MMX. Cobranet boxes are located in the rack to deliver the output feeds to the amps. These amp racks were HEAVY but they swing open and shut really nice...
	Maintenance station. KVM and video monitoring.		The video source rack for the theater. 4 Sierra Designs uncompressed SDI digital video recorders (4:4:4, PAL) were used, one for each screen (2 for the center 3D screen). The fifth was a failover machine which carried a copy of the program on the other 4 units. In the event of a failure of one of the machines, the control system re routed video and control to the fifth with the appropriate time offset.
	Wall Termination cabinets, Video.		The projectors up above the racks.
	A look at the Chevere wiring in the trays and going into the wall terminal boxes. Hey... that's my Rubbermaid cart I left there!		Another one of the Wall Terminal cabinets. Lots of terminations made with Din rail mounted blocks (Entrelec). To make it even cooler we used crimp ferrules on all of the wire ends.
	One of the machines in the "Machine Room". People would come and look at it while it chugged along.		The HAMMER. Magnetic proximity sensors told the Anitech when to fire audio samples which played back from speakers hidden among the works to make it all seem much more active and impressive.
	The Telepresence Operator's station. You sat in this chair and became the Robot. After the audience met the robot, they walked by a window in front of this chair and got to see how it worked!		The OCC (operator control console). We built and supplied these for all of the attractions, they were theoretically all the same. Built A-B Tough! Included an RS-422 LCD display which was fed from the attraction controller, allowed the operators to start up and shut down the show without ever entering the control room. Also included E-STOP buttons, phone, and paging. Hey Howie! How come those buttons are crooked?

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