ImagineRIT 2025

The RIT Theme Park Enthusiasts club hosts a large scale themed experience every year at the Imagine RIT expo featuring a number of individual themed entertainment projects including model Animatronic and Show Action Equipment figures, a VR roller coaster experience on the No-Limits simulator platform, and several scale model rides from club and competition projects. For the 2024-2025 school year I contributed to several of these projects. As one of several club members who had worked professionally in the theme park industry, I sought to apply some of things I had learned from my internship with Universal Creative and to take this as an opportunity to expand my skillset into areas outside of my degree specialty.
In addition to designing and building our exhibit, the entire club pitched in to staff the booth and create a fun and inviting atmosphere for our guests. Having prior experience as a front-line cast member on the Disney College Program I looked for opportunities to re-direct guest flow to project displays with under-utilized capacity, and applied all of Disney's keys and hospitality techniques to anticipate guest needs and provide a better experience that they did not know they wanted.

Design and Theme

Design and Theme is the all-encompassing project to develop a themed experience for the entire area. This years theme was "Enchanted Forest"

Flat Ride

I joined the flat ride team after much of the initial concept and review had been completed, moving into the manufacturing and implementation phase. I contributed CAD models for the ride vehicles and assisted with circuit design and build.

No-Limits VR

Initial concept for the ride had been sketched out before I joined the team, though I had plenty of input on the ride layout and while I was new to the No-Limits platform I contributed small parts to the ride structure and made some simple mesh models in Blender. I helped design some of the physical "gem" props that were placed around the exhibit to tie into the mystical grotto subsection of the enchanted forest theme and on the day of Imagine 2025 I spent a significant portion of the day running the booth and acting as a ride operator to ensure guest experience and safety throughout the experience. Even though there are no moving parts VR can be disorienting so to ensure health and safety, guests had to be monitored just as closely as on a real-life attraction and part of the setup for each ride involved a safety spiel to ensure no guest panicked or tried to stand up with the VR headset on if they became neauseous or disoriented