Theme park attractions don’t normally require real suspension of disbelief. You strap into a vehicle, get swung around a bit, and then you’re off and running to the next line. But when you’re dealing with an entire immersive world, like Disney’s new Pandora: The World of Avatar, that dynamic changes. There has to be a narrative behind the ride, an in-world reason for people to line up when they’ve ostensibly traveled to an alien world known for its lush, exotic landscapes.
Pandora’s flagship attraction, Flight of Passage, might as well be a case study in how to pull off that kind of challenge. It’s a 3D motion simulator ride that lets visitors link to a Na’vi avatar, straight from the core conceit of the film, and take an aerial tour on one of the planet’s wild Banshees. It’s a technological marvel, seamlessly creating the illusion of careening through valleys and soaring past floating mountains. But it’s also a remarkable exercise in storytelling, linking the film to the physical park in its own unique way, resulting in one of the most immersive ride experiences I’ve encountered.
“How do we make it feel like every person is truly there?”
“There were a number of things that people really wanted to do on Pandora, and one of them was flying on the back of a Banshee,” David Lester, show programmer at Walt Disney Imagineering, tells me on a busy press day. In the world of theme parks, Imagineers are the closest thing you can find to rock stars, and the company has doubled the number of Imagineer groups available to discuss Pandora in order to meet the demand. “Every decision about how to create this experience, what technology to use, was all designed with that in mind: How do we make it feel like every person engaging in this experience is truly there?”
The first test is patience: you’re going to be queuing for Flight of Passage for some time
With Flight of Passage, that starts with the premise of the park itself. It’s been 100 years since the events featured in the film Avatar, and people now visit Pandora to learn about its exotic plants and wildlife. Years of abuse from humans harmed its fragile ecosystems, however, and a group called the Pandora Conservation Initiative has begun to track the world’s various keystone species — specific animals or plants that support the ecosystem as a whole. One of those is the Banshee, known to live in Pandora’s floating mountains, and as a result PCI has begin using an updated version of the avatar mind-linking technology to monitor their progress.