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T H E C O M M U N I T Y O F B U S I N E S S

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$1.50 VOL. 38 NO. 21 MAY 25-31, 2015

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ORANGE COUNTY BUSINESS JOURNAL

Storage products maker WesternDigital Corp. will shed 115 jobsfrom its Irvine headquarters as partof a “moderate restructuring” in re-sponse to sagging global PC sales.The cuts from its WD subsidiary

will conclude in about a month, ac-cording to a filing with California’sEmployment Development Depart-ment.The move aims to align “resources

with the current market conditions for our products,”

Western Digital toCut at Irvine HQTECHNOLOGY: 6% trim claims115 jobs in ‘moderate restructuring’

�Western Digital 5

�Abbott Medical 12

Amusement parks in Orange Countyand companies based here that operateparks elsewhere are adding immersive, in-teractive and gaming attractions to taptrends toward more personalized customerexperiences.Offerings range from relatively simple

coin-operated arcade games to full-scale“dark rides”—traditional indoor, tracked-vehicle journeys through various scenes.

An example ofhitting all three el-ements of thetrend came thismonth at Knott’s

Berry Farm in Buena Park, where theVoyage to the Iron Reef ride opened.Knott’s said it’s a way to keep up with the demand

for the immersive, interactive and gaming attractions(see sidebar, page 112) in Southern California’scrowded landscape of entertainment options. �Parks 112

Santa Ana-based Abbott Med-ical Optics has a pipeline ready todeliver a steady stream of new prod-ucts that the eye specialist is count-ing on for a boost in the second halfof the year.The unit of Chicago-based diver-

sified medial device maker AbbottLaboratories is set to introduceseven products by the end of 2015.“We’ve put significant emphasis

on technology development,” Leonard Borrmann,

Abbott Medical’sPipeline Set to Flow HEALTHCARE: 7 new devices setto hit market over rest of year

INSIDE

Telogis Raises$25M

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Behr Gets‘Emotional’

page 101

SwimSpot’sProgress

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ocbj.com

The 100-foot Mojo eases away from the dockto navigate Newport Harbor, passing waterfrontmansions and celebrity getaways on its way toopen waters.Champagne flows and plates of appetizers

circulate among glad-handing guests who spillout from the newly remodeled main cabin onto �FantasyAces 110

Aliso Viejo-Based Startup Aims to Secure Standing in Fast-Growing Segment of Online Gaming

decks to soak in the Southern California sun.The custom cruise is void of millionaires—

but money is on the minds of many aboard.This is a warm-up for the $100,000 Fantasy-Aces Basketball Championship, a test of skillsfor 12 hopefuls who will square off in a one-day fantasy tournament.The players all put up an initial $109 entrance

Highlands Ranch, Colo.-based apartment devel-oper and investor UDR Inc.has entered into a deal inwhich it could spend $269million to take over owner-ship of two rental complexesunder construction in the Platinum Triangle. The publically traded company, an active buyer

and developer in Orange County’s booming rentalmarket over the past few years, said last week thatit closed on a $136 million joint venture withScottsdale, Ariz.-based Wolff Co. involving five

Deal Ups PlatinumTriangle Rental Value

�UDR 29

REAL ESTATE: $269M for Katellasites would set mark for sales in area

By PAUL HUGHES

OC Theme Parks Immersed in Latest TrendGaming Changers

Mojo mates: Bryan, Trent Frisina greet guests during day cruise on 100-foot yacht as part of packagefor final round of $100,000 fantasy tournament

By CHRIS CASACCHIA

Forever-and-EverViews

page 30

Milligan: frus-trated on pace,transparency ofregulatoryprocess inChina

By VITA REED

Tanzer: “oph-thalmology isreally undergo-ing a revolu-tion”

By CHRIS CASACCHIA

By MARK MUELLER

This Fantasy All Business

“People don’t wake up saying, ‘I want to go hereor there,’ ” said General Manager Raffi Kaprelyan,the top executive at the park. “They wake up saying,‘I want to have fun.’”

Iron Reef: players fight monsters to earn points during ride

Special Report: Tourism

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Special Reportpage 17

Taylor MorrisonBuys PacificaSan Juan

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112 ORANGE COUNTY BUSINESS JOURNAL Local breaking news: www.ocbj.com MAY 25, 2015

� from page 1Parks“We’re using new technology to tell the

same stories” people know, Kaprelyan said.Knott’s isn’t alone.Disneyland Resort in Anaheim has several

experience-based attractions, and Burbank-based owner Walt Disney Co. has an entireunit designing new ones—its famed “imagi-neers.”Great Wolf Lodge Southern California in

Garden Grove, scheduled to open early nextyear, plans two interactive game adventuressimilar to attractions at its Madison, Wis.-based parent company’s 12 other resorts.

KrakenKnott’s is part of a chain of parks run by

Sandusky, Ohio-based Cedar Fair Entertain-ment Co.Iron Reef is the second such ride in Cedar

Fair’s system after a similar one built at a parkin Canada. Montreal-based Triotech Amusement Inc.

designed both rides.“Knott’s is doing next-generation work,”

said Triotech Chief Executive and PresidentErnest Yale. The Iron Reef ride includes 10 large, curved

screens and 44 high-definition projectors.“It’s like in cinemas, with a video game en-

gine [and layers of interaction], so the moreyou play, the more you see,” Yale said.The story has riders battling the Queen of

the Kraken, who leads an army of mechanicalsea creatures, including a giant mechanical oc-topus, who eat metal—namely old Knott’srides. “Easter eggs”—hidden items in gamesto be seen by observant players—include im-ages of those rides from the park’s past. Play-ers earn points good for bragging rights.The new ride dovetails with renovations of

various attractions at Knott’s over the past sev-eral years.Matthew Ouimet, who became chief exec-

utive in 2012 after a career that included a stintas president of Disneyland Resort, has spear-headed the updates, Kaprelyan said.

WolfGreat Wolf Lodge Southern California plans

two interactive gaming attractions and an im-mersive theater experience when it opens nextyear, said spokeswoman Susan Storey.Most guests at the company’s 12 resorts

around the U.S. are families with childrenages 2 to 14, Storey said.“If you’re coming to Great Wolf Lodge, you

have kids,” she said. For children ages 5 to 9, resorts have Club-

house Crew, which involves stuffed animalsof the company’s themed characters—twowolves, two raccoons, a bear and a squirrel—embedded with microchips. Families buy theanimals, then walk around the resort stoppingat six stations to complete tasks.

Older kids play Mag-iQuest, which also in-volves a trek like ascavenger hunt aroundthe resort. Players com-pete with friends andfamily to complete var-ious tasks. The gameinvolves different sto-ries, video screens, anda “quest” to become a“master magi,” Storeysaid.“It’s live action and

interactive, with critical thinking, reading, andtime-based challenges,” she said. “It’s defi-nitely a trend in family travel.” Great Wolf launched a second series of ad-

ventures called ShadowQuest to keep kidsplaying. Storey said Garden Grove will be thefirst property in the company to have the latestversion, called Rise of the Totem Masters.She said a single property’s cost to install

the games can hit $1 million.The company has sold 1.6 million wands

systemwide. They now cost about $20 each.Activation is $14. The wand is active for thelength of stay but is kept by the child and canbe reactivated with stored information intactat any resort. Storey said the 603-room resort, which is

nearing completion in Garden Grove, alsoplans to have an immersive movie experience,“Howly Wood” XD Theater, made by Tri-otech.

AvatarDisneyland Resort was among the first

parks to add experience-based attractions, in-cluding gaming entry Toy Story MidwayMania and the immersive Soarin’ Over Cali-fornia.Being first means the rides are older—7 and

14 years old, respectively.Disneyland representatives declined com-

ment for this article, but this month the park

reopened Soarin’ with a new screen and pro-jection system, and Toy Story is likely to becomplemented at some point at the park by anew interactive attraction.Comments by Disney Imagineering’s Chief

Creative Officer Bruce Vaughn in the May2015 FunWorld magazine suggest the likeli-hood of such changes.Vaughn told the trade magazine by Alexan-

dria, Va.-based International Association ofAmusement Parks and Attractions that Dis-ney sees shifts “from a more passive audience[among guests] to an active one” and that“these behaviors … play well in our designs.”A Disney attraction based on the film

“Avatar” for Walt Disney World in Orlando,Fla., is expected to include different experi-ences based on the time of day a patron visits.Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Bob Iger

told Variety magazine in December that thecompany plans additional attractions based onthe “Star Wars” movies.

BeyondAliso Viejo-based Apex Parks Group and

Newport Beach-based Palace Entertain-ment Inc.—each of which runs chains ofsmaller amusement parks in California andnationwide—are carrying the trend to theirparks.Apex has16 parks in four states, including

Boomers locations in Irvine and FountainValley. The Irvine Boomers location includes

Lazer Frenzy, a maze made up of intersect-ing laser beams, and a horror-themed“shooter”game called Dark Escape, sold byBandai Namco Amusement America Inc.in Chicago.“In the old days, you go to an arcade, you

play, you go home,” said Senior Vice Presi-dent of Operations Gregg Borman. “Todayyou have to be able to brag about it.”He said Apex is looking at adding a Tri-

otech XD Theater this year.Palace runs 22 parks that include a

Boomers in Vista and Castle Park in River-side. Spokesperson Michele Wischmeyer said

Palace is adding an immersive theater at itsKennywood theme park in Pittsburgh that’sbeing built by Toronto-based SimEx-Iw-erks, which also supplies the short films toshow in it. Palace and Apex have also used a coin-op-

erated, media-based simulator ride called Ty-phoon, also from Triotech.

“Going to a park is no longer just a passiveexperience,” Wischmeyer said.

CostsCosts for such attractions can range from

about $20,000 for a simple product like Ty-phoon to six figures for theater installationsof about 12 to 100 seats, to $1 million or sofor Great Wolf’s MagiQuest or several mil-lions of dollars for an immersive, interactive,gaming dark ride. Knott’s wouldn’t say how much it spent on

Iron Reef, but reports have placed costs forthe similar ride in Canada at about $10 mil-lion. That’s the range of the price of admission

to trends in amusement parks and gaming, thelatter of which now has virtual reality prod-ucts from companies such as NextVR Inc. inLaguna Beach and was in large part born inOrange County.“We had arcades, then the home consoles

caught up, and now it’s back to how can weget people out of the home,” said BrianFargo, who founded Interplay Inc. in 1983and is chief executive of Newport Beach-based gaming company InXile Inc.“It’s an amusement park, so they need to be

accessible,” he said, but to capture new play-ers, the attraction also “has to be unique anddifferent.” �

Terms of the Trend

An experience-based attraction in-cludes one or more of three components,according to people in the industry.

� Immersive happens in a specific orconfined space, such as a theater or vehi-cle, giving the illusion of being in a dif-ferent place. It usually includes media,such as a massive video screen, and sen-sory elements, such as movement, scent,noise, water spray, and so on.

� Interactive means participation inthe attraction, usually by some physicaldevice—a wand, for instance, or a fakegun. Some attractions called “interactive”might only require use of a touch screenor tablet.

� Gaming introduces the element ofcompetition—scores are tallied and com-pared on screens and in conversationamong participants—whether on thesame ride, a previous, or later one, or indifferent parts of the country. �

Kaprelyan: “We’reusing new technol-ogy to tell the samestories”

MagiQuest: attraction expected for Great Wolf’s opening next year

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