Building One World 2087
The Scale Model
In August 2023 the One World team set out to design and build a 1:12 scale model of our Space Elevator ride experience – the central feature of our forthcoming immersive exhibition, One World 2087.
Our goal was simple, we wanted to recreate the full Space Elevator ride experience at one twelfth scale (one inch equals one foot). This meant the biggest challenge wasn’t building the structure of the model, but integrating all the technical elements that would exist in the life-size ride.
The model would need to have screens for windows, an audio system, controllable lighting, and a moving floor, not to mention the visuals, audio narration, and music that would all need to be created from scratch.
To our delight, we were able to source everything we needed: ultra-thin portable displays for the screens, a small bluetooth transducer for the audio system, WS2811 LED modules to approximate the lighting system, and an Arduino with several servos to drive the floating floor.
In order to create the visual content that would depict a realistic ascent from ground level all the way into Low Earth orbit we chose to use Unreal Engine 5. Not only would UE5 enable us to develop visuals for the scale model, but everything we built would translate to the full-scale ride.
With UE5 as our engine, we used Cesium for Unreal and the Google Maps Photorealistic 3D tiles API to provide us with a fully accurate geospatial 3D model of the Earth – we stand on the shoulders of giants. Deep thanks to Epic, Cesium, and Google for making all these tools available to everyone for FREE so we could bring our creative vision to life!
The last piece needed to complete the scale model was a show controller – a piece of software that controls all the technical components (visuals, lights, sounds, and servos) in the model so they function synchronously to provide a seamless ride experience.
We developed the show controller in Max 8, a visual programming language that makes it easy to build bespoke, functional user interfaces on the fly. With a quick audio recording of the elevator captain’s narration and some placeholder music – one of our favorite songs – we were ready to go.
All said the scale model took about a week to build from start to finish. We spent a long weekend building the model and developing the visual content, and spent a few days on top of that programing the lights, Arduino, and show controller.
Building the scale model was a great step toward building our life-size Space Elevator ride. We got a good handle on our content production pipeline and were able to approximate the design of the other technical systems we planned to use.
Even though it was a small first step, we were really pleased with how it came out. Having a visual to explain what you want to build is really important, especially when you’re building an elevator ride to space.
The VR Headset Demo
By September we set out on our next phase of development and began working on a VR headset version of our Space Elevator ride experience. While nearly identical in terms of content, the VR demo gave our test audience a first person view of what it was like to ascend into orbit.
We had received lots of feedback and even though the scale model gave people a clear understanding of what we were building it didn’t give them the feeling of the experience – this was a critical missing ingredient.
“I could sit in here for hours”