RIDERCAM® Any US parks on board?

More than just a still picture from your favorite coaster.

http://www.ridercam.de/dsl/eng/index.htm

Whoa...that's pretty awsome.

Although I cringe at the thought of enthusiasts doing like...ride commentaries. lol

Thats pretty neat. Do they actually have this at Europa Park and Holiday Park, or are they just used as models for the product.

Seems kind of neat, and might be a popular product at a park (more so than photos).

I think that it would be cool to get one of these, but I really have a soft spot for On Ride Photo's. When I go to a new park I have to get at least one on ride photo.

Neat. I wonder how much it costs per DVD. It might be cool of the park put onride videos of the other coasters on there, maybe then it would be worth it for me.

I like the girl that looks like she's going to crap herself going up the Expedition GeForce hill. That's classic.

Sorry to take this in a 'serious' driection, but this could be useful beyond the souvenir/fun factor.

I assume each car would have to be fitted with cameras as to cover every rider.

Well, now you have video of what every rider does during their ride. In the case of accidents, this would be an invaluable tool. You could see exactly what happened, what went wrong and what went down.

Heck, if the park was anal enough, this could even act as a sort of on-ride 'surveillance' against general misbehavior.

At any rate, it's kind of cool, I guess.

I was in Germany last July. Neither Holiday Park or Europa had these rider cams.Although, they might have received the cameras after I was there. I think this is a great idea. Like Lord Gonchar said, it could save a parks butt also.

Sounds like a perfect fit for a Disney park: a "big brother" observation system disgused as an innocent guest experience improvement ...

The legal benefits are pretty good though. Do any parks currently have video surveillance of flat rides for purposes of defense in the case of rider injury? Seems like it'd be a relatively inexpensive, easily disguisable, high-benefit installation.

Awesome! I like the idea.

Those videos were hilarious!

-Tina

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CoasterFanMatt said:
Do they actually have this at Europa Park and Holiday Park, or are they just used as models for the product.

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They don´t have it yet.

Its a german who had the idea and who was working on this product for quite some time now. At one point I thought that it would never see the light of day. I guess that the parks he used as a testground will eventually install the system in the next or following season.

I hope that it will become a big success and that the parks will see the big potential (aka: big bucks) they can get out of this idea.

Now that everybody is photographing ride-pictures off the screen with their mobile-phone-cameras, this "private dvd" could be the right thing at the right time.

(those two guys riding "Silver Star" are bizarre!)

The two guys.....what are they praying? LOL! LOL!

I think it would make a KILLING over here. I know I would love to have one taken while riding Dragster. ;-)

-Tina

@security idea. I cant imagine the amount of HD space you would need to archive all that on a daily basis. You could tape it to VHS but that would take half a day probably.

coasterqueenTRN, that would be an ideal ride to have a video of. I cant imagine what my face looked like.

I kinda like the *big brother* idea for parks in terms of protecting their butts liability-wise...although I'm a big proponent of the increasingly vague "right to privacy" in general, LOL...

In terms of storing the images, the park can simply delete any unneeded footage at the end of the day, SAVING only the footage needed for insurance/legal issues..

Finally, around 52-54 seconds thru the vdeo, there's a couple of young girls riding on what appears to be a wooden coaster train with COOL looking cars....anyone know what ride that is? TiA...:)

I just got to watch the videos on my lunch break - I wanna know what those old dudes on Silver Star are sayin ;) I sure hope that's me when I'm that age - those guys look like they're havin' the time of their lives. And also, how can Silver Star be *that* bad? Looks pretty awesome to me from that video ...

The ExGe girl is hilarous, looks like she's trying to jump out of the side of the car!

I don't think the disk usage would be that unreasonable. I used Raptor as the coaster in these numbers, and it sounds about right to me.

Ride length: 136 seconds (2:16)
Riders/hour: 1800

Assume 2 riders captured per camera, and you have 900 different 136 second long clips of video per hour.

136*900=122,400 seconds of video to store, or 36 hours. Recording to mpeg2 at normal dvd resolution and a pretty good bit rate (just under 4gigs/hour), that hours worth of video would fit on one 120 gig hard drive.

I think it would be more likely a park would want an instant replay of what happened, rather than coming back a week later and wanting to dig up a specific train. Give people an hour before their ride gets overwritten to buy their disc.

Now the real question is, where do you put the cameras for the front row on Raptor?

I would love to see the capture system for this ride. The video is transmitted from the ride to a central location so hopefully they have a strong signal or there will be some serious issues. Yep, that's a lot of storage to be used but compression and bit rates could help with that, but who wants a poor quality video? I wouldn't.

-Sean (who does think the cars on Colossus are cool but knows he is in the minority)

Am I the only one who thinks this is stupid? I mean, with an on-ride you can frame it and look at it, but with this you need a DVD/VHS player and ou can't put it on a night stand, etc. Oh well...

They could also archive the videos at a lower quality to maximize disk space. You really don't need a DVD quality image to see if someone is horsing around on a ride.

*** Edited 2/9/2005 7:06:20 PM UTC by ShiveringTim***

You're not the only one, Mole. It smacks of Big Brother to me and I'm not the least bit interested in a video of my ride.