Orlando, Florida (November 20th, 2019) – At IAAPA today, WhiteWater received a Brass Ring Award for the Over/Under in the Best New Product: Water Park Ride/Attraction category. A first-of-its-kind fusion water slide, the Over/Under at Guangzhou Sunac Water Park is the world’s first interactive multi-player gaming water slide. Featuring WhiteWater’s first installations of Team Slideboarding and Double Exit Manta, the attraction challenges teams to work together in order to score enough points to be rewarded with a thrilling victory lap and avoid the shame of the losers’ exit.
“We designed the Over/Under to give guests an extra dimension in their ride experience. Instead of creating a slide that’s the longest, tallest, or fastest, we decided to incorporate a storyline and place the choice of which path to take into the riders’ hands, gamifying the ride and making this a shared interactive experience,” said Paul Chutter, Chief Development Officer of WhiteWater.
“Riders can interact with groups of friends or strangers to challenge each other, so instead of a ‘one try, you’ve seen it all’ slide, the Over/Under gives guests a repeat value. Every time they ride the slide, it’s a slightly different experience,” he continued.
Over/Under consists of one of our most iconic features, Manta. With a big drop and a high wall climb, for the winning rafts at least, the slide leaves an impression. Its two different exits make it an attraction that’s sure to attract guests of all ages. This mix of thrill and challenge appeals to a wide range of demographics and play types—making it an experience that can be shared by the entire family in 6-person rafts.
Based on our experience from Slideboarding, our Creative Design team knew that a storyline was the most straightforward and simplest way to deliver rider instructions. They developed an easy to remember story delivered by an animated panda, Shui Shui, on a TV screen at the top of the slide, giving them a shared mission, a mission with consequences—winners would be rewarded, and losers would have their rides end early. This element of challenge helps to encourage repeat ridership, as well as create a buzz-worthy park differentiator.
The brand new smart raft that riders get into on the Over/Under features a low-voltage master control pack that registers signals from the 6 sets of handle controllers which then sends a signal back to the decision station of the slide. The decision station receives the raft’s score and then wirelessly changes the drive settings—blaster jets are turned on for the winners, and jets are turned down for the losers. This lets the rafts travel either uphill or down, giving winners and losers a different ending.