$100 Million 'Transformers' Ride Ready For Passengers

A $100 million theme park ride, based on the Transformers movies by Michael Bay, is set for its first passengers at Universal Studios on Friday (May 25, 2012). The ride - titled 'Transformers: The Ride - 3-D' - is tipped to change the shape of theme park attractions, reports the New York Daily News.

The ride features a 12-seater vehicle designed to look like a Transformer, who goes on a chase through city streets, across rooftops and even inside office buildings - the action is digitally projected onto 14 screens. Universal studios producer Chick Russell was initially keen to produce like-for-like versions of the bots from the movies, but explained, "We realized early in the process that we couldn't get them to do the things we wanted them to do fast or realistic enough to match the excitement of the Bay films.We instead decided to go with a multimedia approach and match 3-D footage with intricate set work, so it doesn't feel like you're just going from screen to screen to screen". Jeff White, the visual effect supervisor from Industrial Light and Magic worked on both the movies, and the attraction. He said the designers created footage in 4k resolution, which is quadruple the number of pixels found on most screens.

The Transformers ride follows countless other attractions based on hit movies, including Saw, Harry Potter, and more recently, the Green Lantern ride.