Wireless rollercoaster lines

Wireless rollercoaster lines. Six Flags parks are implementing a wireless pager system as a means of shortening ride-queues. Customers grab a pager when they enter the park, then squirt it at tranceivers in front of different rides to set a reservation time when they can return and ride, wait-free. The pager is location-sensitive, so it can vary the interval before an impending reservation when it alerts its owner based on how far a walk it is to the next ride.

This is spectacularly cool, but what's even cooler (if more sinister) is the potential for crowd-management and traffic-shaping given a ubiquitous network of these pagers on all of the attendees. While themeparks to date have relied on parade routes as a means of moving guests from one part of a park to another during peak hours -- balancing the crowds to avoid congestion -- such pagers can be selectively set off to move guests who meet different profiles to different park areas. Families with small children could be lured to areas that are currently largely free of rowdy teenagers, reducing the usual antagonism and frustration that the two groups normally evoke in each other.

This also could allow park management to relocate mobile souvenir stands, snack wagons and greeter/streetmosphere staffers to appropriate locations based on realtime aggregate stats that report on the current crowd-trends in different park locations.

Even cooler would be collaborative filtering among pager-holders. Users can be directed to different locations based on the behaviors of riders who have historically rode the same rides in the same order.

This amounts to a TiVo for themeparks -- a dynamic reordering of the park that is mass customized to individual riders' sensibilities. While there is certainly the potential for such technology to be used to change us to suit the whims of park-owners, I find it much more likely and exciting that this stuff will change the park-owners to suit our aggregate whims. Link Discuss (via Reiter's Wireless Data Web Log)