What's your job? David Lo, amusement ride engineer

David Lo doesn’t get motion sickness, which is key for a guy who spends a lot of time being jostled about on theme park rides.

That’s because Lo is in the business of making stomachs flip.

If you’re adrenaline junkie, you’ve probably gotten a kick out of the twists and turns of Universal Studios’ Harry Potter ride or Disney’s epic Soarin’ over California, both of which Lo, an engineer and vice president of technical services at Port Coquitlam, B.C.-based amusement ride designer Dynamic Structures, had a hand in creating.  

But designing million-dollar amusement rides couldn’t have been further from Lo’s mind when he graduated with a masters degree in civil engineering from the University of British Columbia over 25 years ago and took a post at DS working on projects like the Lions Gate Bridge and pulp and paper mill expansions.

When the firm got a call asking them to dismantle and install the 3.6-meter Canada-France-Hawaii telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, Lo found himself suddenly involved in engineering tools for peeking into the depths of space.

It gets weirder still.

After one of the engineers working on Caltech’s W.M. Keck Observatory – another DS project – with Lo left and went to work at Disney, they got their first gig engineering in the themed amusement ride space with Soarin’ over California.

But Lo doesn’t design conventional roller coasters, he creates the media-based rides and trams where thrill-seekers are whisked through an immersive reality where scent, sound, wind, mist and motion are all synchronized with a movie screen.

We chatted with Lo about getting first dibs on testing the rides, the repercussion of falling out of synchronization and the shape of rides to come.

Were you a roller coaster junkie growing up?

Obviously I’ve been to the Pacific National Exhibition but compared to now that I’m in the amusement industry, I’ve been to a lot more.

How does what you do differ from a conventional roller coaster?

In an amusement park, the thrill comes from the acceleration, the g-force. You want people to get scared, to be pushed to the limit. What we're looking at is the inclusive-type ride so the whole family can go on it. I would like to think we're a bit like magicians in that we're trying to create the illusion of flight, to trick you into thinking you're actually moving or banking through synchronization of the mechanical movement with the movie frame-by-frame. We're trying to trick the sensory perception of the guests and create these kinds of thrills in a different way.

So when you’re riding, it’s the same as studying?

With Disney and Universal they have the creative directors and they want to create a certain sensation and they try to convey to you what they want. Sometimes it’s very difficult to grasp that because engineers tend to deal with numbers and creative people tend to deal with feelings. So you end up riding two or three different rides several times and they’ll say “we want this kind of feeling here and this kind of feeling here.” Once you’ve done all that defining the motions and sensation you find the numbers and the hard engineering to turn that into reality. Sometimes it’s more of an art than a science.

What would that process look like with something like the Harry Potter ride?

With Harry Potter for Universal, we'd taken a page out of the automotive industry. We were thinking about when they use robots to assemble cars and we said why couldn’t we put people at the end of those robots? My favourite ride I worked on would still be Harry Potter. It has many elements to it -- from the motion and movement, to the thrill of the close proximity when you’re flying through simulating the Quidditch match. You really get the feeling that you're actually flying through the field. You’re moving from scene to scene. It’s not like you’re in the theatre. That to me is pretty amazing.

Don’t people get motion sickness whipping about like that?

The idea for our type of ride is not to create motion sickness and the synchronization between the movie and the motion is really critical. Human physiology is quite sensitive, so if you actually have the motion out of sync with what you're seeing you can actually make people very sick.

Have you ever hit any serious, er, “challenges” with that?

(Laughs) No, if you find you have a serious hiccup you reprogram that so it doesn’t happen. Sure it can happen but that’s really the whole purpose of prototyping and testing frame-by-frame.

What role do these sorts of rides play in the future of amusement parks?

I think there’s always going to be a market for steeper, scarier rides but I think that is a very narrow segment. We think moving forward, virtual reality will be in greater demand, especially with the younger demographic. We want to blur the lines between virtual reality and semi-virtual reality, to offer interactivity. Holodeck-type simulation isn’t available yet so until that time comes we’ll build on the interactivity. If you go to the amusement park right now and go on the rollercoaster it’s a programmed rail, pre-planned route and all the g-force you experience in the same each time you ride it. But what if you do an entire interactive ride where you’re whitewater rafting and everybody paddles in a certain direction and if you’re good enough you can try class four or class five rapids?

And finally, what’s the pay like?

It’s on par with what civil engineers make (around $76,000). Because the entertainment engineering industry is not really so much of an industry like aerospace – it requires a broad skillset and we draw people from the automotive industry, structural industries and sub-sea even. My friends and family think I have the dream job but honestly when you get right down to it, it’s engineering.