MOST POPULAR
Thrill Engineer Brendan Walker on the Science of Sensation
'According to Thrill Engineer Brendan Walker, the most thrilling moment of any theme park experience is just before it begins.
'That brief interlude between being...
VR Playground background
VR Playground is an experiential ride installation and public aerial performance by artist Brendan Walker and his Thrill Laboratory. In VR Playground, Walker propels...
Bucking Bronco: Adaptive Ride Experiment No.1
Could you control a rider's experience based purely on their physiological data?
'Experiment No.1' featured 3 bankers, each with different attitudes to thrill seeking and...
LATEST ARTICLES
Can you remember swinging in the playground as a child: enjoying sensations of speed and weightlessness as you swooped high and low; laughing with friends, hoping they didn't spot that you were a little scared? Thrill Engineer, Brendan Walker...
Halloween's as good a time as any to reveal that I've had 14 requests from bark.com over the past 10 months, from customers seeking the services of a local paranormal investigator. Ashley sees shadows in his park. Kim is...
A few years ago, Samsung invited the Thrill Engineer to swap his boiler suit for a lab coat. I was asked to conduct scientific research to answer some pretty tough questions: why do odd socks go missing; what's the...
I've been invited to guest curate the physics and engineering section of this new exhibition by the National Fairground and Circus Archive (NFCA) A PDF of the exhibition poster can be downloaded here). I reflect on Orton & Spooner's...
If you're anywhere between the ages of 16 and 18 then your appetite for sensation seeking is at its height, and your perception of risk is rock bottom. Go and have some fun! - you don't need advice from...
This summer I had the pleasure of working closely with folk-rock musician and artist Keaton Henson as he developed a new composition that explored his personal relationship with anxiety. Together we created interactive stage lighting, which we designed to...
If you love public social occasions and location-based entertainment, then the darkest months of the coronavirus pandemic will have seemed very long indeed. Cinema was hit particularly hard, as large indoor public gatherings were outlawed. So what did movie-lovers...
This week, out of the blue, and amidst everything going on, I was sent the most amazing message and photograph from this chap, Mylo.
Mylo and his dad are stuck at home. They watched my Royal Institute lecture on...
The following account is recreated from interviews with those who were there, and then dramatised for the internet. All video footage contained below is real, unedited, and as shot by independent witnesses.
Slow zooming closeup onto shiny red 1970s telephone....
Friends at Frontier Developments asked me to be the brand ambassador for Planet Coaster, and give a lecture to thousands of fans at their Expo in 2017. This video gives you the complete lecture, which I have since delivered...
I produced a collection of images capturing the emotions of riders at the fairground as they experienced a moment of ultimate thrill. I built a body mounted auto-portrait machine that detects the emotion of thrill through real-time sampling and...