A smart rink which will show menacing figures of sea monsters swimming through thin ice.

Monsters in attendance include the Ichthyosaur (extinct fishlike marine reptile having a porpoiselike head and an elongated, toothed snout), the Pliosaur (crocodile-shaped, carnivorous, with long and powerful jaws carrying many sharp, conical teeth) and piranhas (voraciously carnivorous, and often attack and destroy other animals).

Sea monsters can be programmed to follow random skaters. The rink show includes a sea monster posse fight for rink domination and skaters can follow them around the rink to find out who's going to get eaten.

Also, every time someone nails a jump like an axel, loop, or salchow, you will hear the sound of ice cracking.
-- pyggy potamus, Jan 05 2008

clear ice requires pure water http://recipes.hows...com/question205.htm
[po, Jan 05 2008]

Have you any idea as to the means by which this can be accomplished?
-- BJS, Jan 05 2008


ahh, right, thank you [bjs]

the technical stuff: i don't have an engineering background so this will be awful...well, liners exist for backyard rinks, they can hold as little as 3 to as much as 12 inches of ice for skating, i'm going with 3" because i want the figures to be seen [the sea monsters will probably be all black, unless someone has a way of making colors visible through ice, i have no clue how to do it, i tried looking at something through an ice cube, i just saw a hazy figure]...

i pictured a transparent liner for the 3" ice on top of heavy duty glass [or what-have-you], it will protect a rink wide monitor which is hooked up to the system which runs the rink shows [sights and sounds]

if anybody has a better way of doing this, you're welcome to add your 2cents worth.

thanks.
-- pyggy potamus, Jan 05 2008


yup, layers:

Top = ice Middle = plexiglass Bottom = surface which gets the light from an LCD projector, say another 5 meters away/deeper.

"Follow" people by renting skates which contain RFID chips or other tracking device.

Quite doable, as vertical real-estate is much cheaper than horizontal. Quite marketable, as it's all about novelty at rinks, and this adds a lot of it.
-- sophocles, Jan 05 2008


How about a fluorescent membrane below the ice, and monsters produced by UV digital projection from the roof? Two or three sources to triangulate to a point would vastly reduce the effect of shadows and the intensity of UV which hits skaters directly.
-- vincevincevince, Jan 05 2008


Doesn't matter if the ice is not clear (and it won't be, as there will be a layer of scraped ice/fine powder on the surface. Menacing dark silhouettes would work just as well.
-- david_scothern, Jan 05 2008



random, halfbakery