InPark met with Alterface CEO Benoit Cornet during IAAPA’s 2018 AAE show in Hong Kong.
What is your perception of the Asia market?
The market in China is starting to open up outside of the major cities, providing opportunities in smaller and medium sized venues. So it is important for us to be present in this region. That being said, as a Brussels-based company we are looking forward to IAAPA’s EAS show in Amsterdam – it will be very easy for us to get to.
What can expect to see next from Alterface in terms of technology?
Since IAAPA Orlando we have been working on moving the technology for our dark rides outside of the traditional ride building and into a larger park setting. Essentially, we are taking our RFID based shooting systems and placing them in portable devices. We call it NOMAD which stands for “New Optimized Mobile Action Device”, a compact and portable device that enables interaction with media screens, scenery and animatronics.
The system is up and running with regular-sized devices, so now we are focused on miniaturizing components to make the devices even easier to carry around. It will basically be a Harry Potter style wand, only with much more powerful tracking of location and trajectory. The device could be used on multiple attractions or shows, and since each one would have a unique ID, the system would be able to recognize individuals.
The technology could be put on dark rides, flying theaters, roller coasters, walk through attractions….really anything! We are expecting it to be ready by spring of 2019.
Tell us about your recently opened Basilisk dark ride at Poland’s Legendia park.
Basilisk is a perfect example of what we can provide. It is a sub-five million euro dark ride with customized content, delivered turnkey for the client.
Within that price range we can also do the Erratic dark ride, but because that is a non-linear experience, the content is limited to what we have already created. It’s harder to create a story precisely because the ride is not linear.
We are inspired by the success of Basilisk and the Erratic dark ride to combine the two ideas into a new concept: a dueling dark ride that is non-linear. We are currently figuring out the details of how that would work using simulators and modeling different concepts. We hope to have more news on this front soon.
