SeaWorld Yas Island, Abu Dhabi
Miral and United Parks & Entertainment partnered to develop SeaWorld Yas Island, Abu Dhabi, a landmark project which opened on Yas Island, Abu Dhabi in May 2023. The marine life park became the first SeaWorld-branded Park to open in 30 years outside of North America.
Holovis provided a full parkwide audio visual solution alongside a parkwide interactive game. This incredible, complex AV project, easily one of the largest in the world, was vast in scope and challenge and we were selected to blend our engineering, project management and AV design expertise to deliver this exciting landmark theme park project.
AV
The park’s central hub, the One Ocean Hub, boasts one of the world’s largest LED screens as its crown jewel. Fully cylindrical in design, this colossal immersive screen covers an expansive area of over 3,000 square meters, standing 15m high with a circumference of 218m. Accompanying the LED screen in One Ocean Hub is an impressive LED Globe, measuring 5.4m in diameter, delivering a multi-faceted visual experience, and providing guests with unique and engaging visual content.
The impressive supporting infrastructure of the park includes over 1,800 speakers, 250 digital displays, and 150 back-of-house racks housed in 28 comms rooms, interconnected by over 350,000 meters of cable.
Additionally, we partnered with Verity to create an impressive indoor drone show featuring 160 drones. Echoing the flow of ocean currents, the swarm moves in sync with the visual display on the One Ocean LED wall and LED Globe. This innovative blend of technology marks a new frontier in theme park entertainment, offering visitors a memorable visual experience. Our scope also included general area development regarding AV, digital displays, digital signage, show audio systems, street theatre AV, and interactives.
Parkwide Game
Guests are invited to join the S·E·A, a long-standing organization that works to protect our planet and One Ocean through advancing science, exploration, and adventure. Guests enroll in the “S·E·A Guardian Games”, a prestigious series of games held by the S·E·A to prove who will become an “S·E·A Guardian”. Along their journey across the eight realms of the One Ocean, players will take part in over 15 interactive games with over 100 touchpoints and unique media moments that are exclusive to players, as well was embarking on interactive quests, scavenger hunts, and side missions.
The experience is a world-first approach to parkwide interactivity, with the gameplay being fully integrated into the park experience, rather than taking place solely in a mobile app. The games, quests, and even checking a player’s progress is all done via “heads up” experiences throughout the park, immersing guests in the environment and allowing them to enjoy the experience with friends and family.
The experience has been designed to drive repeat visitation to the park – it will not be possible to reach the rank of Guardian in just one day, so guests must return to have the full experience. There are even secret pieces of content that are only unlocked by reaching certain levels - but we won’t spoil what those are here!
