After entertaining almost 300,000 guests, the UK’s Wake The Tiger ‘amazement park’ has opened a new expansion. Welcome to the ‘OUTERverse’.
The walk-through immersive attraction in Bristol, which bills itself as “a labyrinth of exploration for both the young and young at heart”, launched the OUTERverse on 2 February. A total of 15 fresh spaces await, adding 1,000 square metres of fantasy to the original ‘Dream Factory’ experience launched in July 2022.
The expansion takes guests beyond the dystopian world of ‘Meridia’ in which the original part of Wake The Tiger is set, and up to the second floor of the building.
A fresh floor of fantasy awaits in the OUTERverse
The voyage begins from the ‘Astral Tour Lounge’, which is followed by the ‘Altered State Bridge’. The latter was constructed by DreamTech Entertainment from LED panels, controlled using Resolume video maps to create the illusion of the world breaking apart. In ‘The Void’, an interactive projection room, depth cameras track guests whose image is shown breaking into particles as they transcend into the OUTERverse. It is here that the real journey begins.
A 15-foot-tall (4.5m) projection mapped head can be seen carved into a stone temple in ‘Aetheria’. “We also built a touch designer interactive control panel,” says technical director, Louie Norwood. “This allows visitors to change the mapping from a central hub to make weird and wonderful modifications from it.”
As in the rest of the attraction, people are then free to plot their own path through the multiple rooms and fantastical themed environments, guided only by their own curiosity.
“There’s so many things to discover along the journey,” adds Wake The Tiger managing director and co-founder Graham MacVoy. “We’ve made sure to weave lots of surprises for visitors to interact with.”
The vending machine with an in-built glitch that freaks out when visitors attempt to buy a train ticket, for example. Read on for a few more spoilers.
Weird, interactive and ethereal
“The ‘Dazzle Room’ is a very weird and disturbing black and white optical illusion,” says Norwood. “It’s been designed by Otter Produces with Unity and Unreal Engine to produce touchable interactive line-bend devices. Guests can stand on pads to change the colours of the lights in the room and create different sounds.”
In the ‘Crystal Chamber’, 16,000 LEDs are meshed onto a roof made of recycled ceiling panels welded to an obscure shape. Cameras detect visitors as they move around and activate crystal installations, which contribute to a central zoetrope animation device.
“This is meant to represent a sentient computer of sorts that is constantly growing, building and controlling,” says Norwood. “We used real selenite crystals that illuminate to bring a physical and ethereal dimension to the chamber.”
Then there’s the ‘Space Box’, crafted like a spaceship travelling through the cosmos. Four pull cords are rigged up to sound effects and visuals. And there’s a special surprise if guests pull all four at once!
Other installations in the OUTERverse include part of a real plane, a cosmic kitchen and a section of nostalgic toys. As before, salvaged and recycled materials were incorporated wherever possible. After exploring all 15 of the new spaces, a 7-metre-high twisting slide returns voyagers back to ‘Earth 2.0’.
Longer length of stay
The average time it takes to experience Wake The Tiger is expected to increase from 1.5 to 2.5 hours following the opening of the new expansion. Ticket prices have been tweaked accordingly from £19.50 to £22.50/£24.95 at peak times. Off-peak prices range from £14.50 to £19.95. For readers outside the UK, that equates to an average of about $25.00/€23.50.
Showcasing some of the city’s best cultural and creative talent, the award-winning Bristol attraction fulfils a long held dream for Boomtown music festival founders Luke Mitchell and Chris Rutherford. The building it calls home, in the city’s St Phillips district, was once used to build Boomtown’s sets.
“We’re so proud of what we have achieved over the past 18 months,” says MacVoy. “This expansion is a natural progression for us. When you have so much creativity and talent working together under one roof, you have to focus that energy somewhere.”
Open Wednesday to Sunday, and seven days a week during school holidays, Wake The Tiger can also be experienced during special sensory sensitive sessions and after hours for adults-only. This is in addition to special events featuring the calibre of DJs, live bands and performers that have provided Boomtown with such a devoted following.
Images courtesy of Andre Pattenden and Wake The Tiger
