INTERVIEW: The Ride goes virtual with ‘Downtown Experience’
The Ride has become a staple of the Big Apple, so much so that the company’s cutting-edge buses are an expected presence in the streets of Midtown Manhattan. They have become as much a fabric of the tourist industry as Madame Tussaud’s or those hop-on-hop-off competitors.
However, it doesn’t appear the folks at The Ride like to sit back and have their product become stale. They continue to diversify and conceptualize what the future of tour-bus entertainment will be like in NYC. These efforts have led to several incarnations and experiences of the traveling phenomenon.
First, there’s the flagship property, The Ride, which is billed as an interactive entertainment experience. Ticket buyers board the decked-out bus and enjoy a 75-minute trip through Times Square and Midtown Manhattan. They have on-board hosts and on-the-street performers who help bring this iconic neighborhood to life. Audiences can expect to see a ballet dancer on the street, in addition to a freestyle rapper and hip hop dancer.
The Ride has become so culturally significant that it was parodied on The Simpsons, which is perhaps the hallmark of acceptance. On June 15, The Ride celebrates 15,000 performances.
The Tour is the company’s second project and more of a sightseeing adventure with a navigator. The bus rolls through both Midtown Manhattan and the Upper West Side for 90 minutes, and a slew of multimedia offerings help enhance the experience. On June 12, The Tour celebrates 2,500 performances.
The company’s latest offering is The Downtown Experience, a 90-minute exploration of lower Manhattan that utilizes virtual reality technology to bring the important history lessons of this neighborhood to life.
Richard Humphrey, The Ride’s CEO and CCO, is excited for the company’s new project. “Well, The Downtown Experience, of course, uses our globally patented traveling theaters, except in this particular case, it is very different because it’s not based on the street being the stage,” Humphrey said in a recent phone interview. “It really is a multimedia experience through the birthplace and once again the thriving pulse of New York City, which is Downtown, south of Canal Street. The big difference on this — because I always like to push the technology forward — is that it’s enhanced with virtual reality, so during the course of the adventure, we’ll have some moments where you’ll put on your headsets. And everybody aboard will go back and experience certain moments in history.”
One of the challenges of all three properties is that the streets of New York City can be quite unpredictable. Humphrey called traffic in the Big Apple an “art in itself,” and the company needs to anticipate modifications along the route.
For The Downtown Experience, the tour is hosted by one person called the Storyteller. It’s up to this person and the driver to keep everything interesting and on time. “So, for instance, if you go on a Sunday morning, the 90-minute adventure could really be done in probably 65 minutes, but on a Monday afternoon, the 90-minute adventure could be 120 minutes if you don’t take a couple of shortcuts,” Humphrey said. “So that’s the major challenge, but we have fewer performers on the street, only two in this adventure. On The Ride, you know, we have a big behind-the-scenes office with a live manager, and frequently police, particularly since [Donald] Trump has been president, close down streets whimsically in the Fifth Avenue area. And then we have to, through our app, contact the performers, change the route on the fly while The Ride’s in progress and move people around, so, yeah, it’s very challenging.”
The virtual reality component of The Downtown Experience has presented some welcome challenges as well. “I had to come up with a solution with my team of how we could seamlessly launch this virtual reality simultaneously on all 49 headsets, so we’ve got a patentable app that is now able to do that,” he said. “I think that that really makes the adventure seamless because the Storyteller can say, ‘All right, ladies and gentlemen, put your headsets on, and let’s go to Gen. George Washington’s inaugural, 1789.’ And then we transform through CGI the Federal Plaza into the actual landscape architecturally of how it looked in 1789, and then, of course, it becomes a costume drama in 360 green screen with 300 actors in period costumes and, of course, the star, Gen. George Washington, crossing through the plaza. So those moments are really a lot of fun. They were very challenging to write and build. Each of the vignettes are about 90 seconds, but there’s a wide variety of them. A couple of them are historic. A couple of them are very hallucinogenic and nuts. We do Black Tuesday, 1929, which was the most purposeful of all the virtual realities because instead of being in one location, we literally go through the stock exchange, which we recreated in CGI, so it would look like it did in 1929. So I think we’ve got some pretty groundbreaking stuff here at the moment.”
When Humphrey came aboard The Ride, the goal for him and the company was to remain cash-flow positive, the CEO said. In New York City, that’s easier said than done. They got The Ride up and running, banked on critical acclaim and the experience going viral on social media, and then tracked down opportunities for joint ventures and licensing.
“I started to see other opportunities because the buses weren’t fully utilized,” he said. “We have four, but there were periods of time, like during off seasons and stuff, where you can’t really afford to have these $1.5 million vehicles just in a lot. So then we did The Tour, which, of course, is quite different because it’s just utilizing the technology in creating the past, present and future. … The other challenge is as time passes how do you keep The Ride cutting-edge, which was one of our branding issues, and the virtual reality, which I’ve had an interest in for a long time, seemed to be the way to go with that. So now we actually have launched our own pass, which we’re calling The Experience Pass, and The Experience Pass, if you’re in town for however long, you can do The Ride, you can do The Tour and have Downtown. And in addition to that, with the co-marketing with the Hornblower, you also get an hour tour around Manhattan. So we sort of have the city covered at the moment.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Downtown Experience joins The Ride and The Tour as an interactive experience on the streets of New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
