In the flying ride Gemini, you will relive the life of a young lady, Echo, whose diary was found when a tenement was torn down. You will experience her fears surrounding her appearance and the anxiety she had received from society. You will go through an ancient ritual performed to attain your desired appearance, cross a river that reveals your deepest shames, and finally join the no-faces in a dance that will take you in between reality and dreams. You will see, despite the advance in technology, that many human flaws still haunt us to this day. There are problems that technology can resolve, but the human mind can only resolve its problems on its own.

The theme of the ride is appearance anxiety, yet it is not skin deep as it appears. Through exploring this issue, I aim to capture the essence of the emotion “fear”.

The story’s setting is inspired by Eastern and Western descriptions of the Underworld, with high mountains and a river running through, dividing the living and the dead. The visual elements used in the ride are taken from gothic, surrealism, and dadaism. Through these representations, I aim to discuss what evokes fear and what really lies at the bottom of this particular emotion.

The main characters are all apparatuses designed to draw out our emotion surrounding the desires and risks that one faces when seeking for a perfect appearance. The altar signifies desperate prayers, while the melted faces reveal the fear of its failure. The fish monster lurking in the woods adds to the ride an absurdity and surrealistic atmosphere, and, finally, the no faces, with their correction lines, are yet to be defined. They represent both the becoming of an “ideal” self and the darkness that precedes.

I developed primary characters’ looks and created, rigged, and animated them using Autodesk Maya, with Metahuman’s animations captured through motion capture. Subsequently, I built the environment and lighting within Unreal Engine 5.

The ride takes us through the altar, flying from the cliff, across the river, into the jungle on the other side, and finally back to reality, signifying the process of going through fire and high water, only to recognize the recurrence of insatiable desires.

In this flying theatre ride experience, the vehicle is made of three circles to create an isolating and immersive effect.The Queue line station of Gemini is a human’s face from the top view, with two lines to get into the station and a robot in front of the screen explaining the background of our journey.

We sent data from Unreal Engine to Max and designed the Max nodes to control movements on a Stewart Platform. This section is completed by Siru Yao. Then together we optimizing sound and movement effects based on the testing results.