Tech

I wore an Apple Watch to this haunted amusement park to see if it’s scary

Roller coasters in the dark are awesome and scary; horror mazes, maybe not so much.

Sebastian Anthony – Oct 11, 2015 6:00 PM | 74

Credit: Sebastian Anthony

The Apple Watch, in my eyes, is good for three things: fitness tracking, Apple Pay, and being able to glance at notifications without having to reach into my trousers and pull out my fondleslab. I now pay for almost everything with my Apple Watch, but fitness tracking... well, I'm, er, rather sedentary. I try my best to stand up whenever my Apple Watch tells me I've been sitting still for too long (except for when I'm driving my car), but otherwise I haven't once availed myself of the Watch's fitness tracking features.

This week, however, an opportunity presented itself: I had been invited to the opening night of Thorpe Park's Fright Nights, the UK's premier haunted amusement park. Finally I could use my Apple Watch not to track my fitness, but to see if plummeting "beyond vertically" on the Saw roller coaster into a pitch-black hole on a dark and moonless night with the sound of demented clowns in the distance would actually raise my heart rate.

Thorpe Park has the usual assortment of roller coasters, amusements, crappy little stalls where you can waste money trying to throw a hoop over a bottle, fast food joints, etc. Usually the park closes in the evening, but for the last few years they've been running these Fright Nights over the Halloween period. The events give you the opportunity to ride the roller coasters in the dark (which is rather fun), plus there are some temporary horror movie-themed amusements like Saw and Cabin in the Woods horror mazes or a Blair Witch Project walkthrough experience. The main attraction, if you're afraid of clowns at least, is meant to be The Big Top, where you're assaulted by a variety of, you guessed it, clowns.

Testing methodology

Before we go any further, I should point out that the heart rate sensor on the Apple Watch has never done a very good job of reading my pulse. Even though I follow Apple's guidelines on ensuring a good fit, my resting heart rate always bounces all over the place (as low as 35, as high as 120). Sometimes, it won't get a reading at all.

I don't know if it's a problem specific to my wrist—I have quite a hairy wrist, and my skin perfusion (blood flow) could be too low—or if it's just a general problem for the Apple Watch and other wrist-mounted heart rate sensors. The Internet says you should use a chest-mounted sensor to get a more accurate reading, but I didn't have the time to sort one of those out.

Still, despite the unreliability of the readings, they do seem to be in the right ballpark. For example, I know from previous ye-olde-fingers-to-carotid-artery testing that my resting heart rate is around 70bpm (beats per minute)—and indeed, the line of best fit from the Apple Watch's heart rate sensor is also around 70bpm. We'll call this my "resting" baseline. Under slightly more strain—walking to and from the Underground, for example (OK, my cardiac fitness is awful)—the Apple Watch seems to think my heart rate is around 85bpm. We'll call this my "gentle exercise" baseline.

My testing methodology was thus: Before heading to Thorpe Park, I spent a couple of hours establishing a baseline resting heart rate. To establish the baseline and to measure my heart rate during the rides and amusements, I used the "open workout" option on the Apple Watch, which constantly measures your heart rate until you tap "stop."

I began the "workout" every time I joined the queue for one of the rides at Thorpe Park and stopped it a couple of minutes after I had disembarked. On some rides, I also watched my Apple Watch for the entire duration to see my heart rate in real time. (For future reference, this is a really bad idea; watching a tiny little screen while you're flung around a quintuple heartline roll can cause not-insignificant nausea.)

So, was Fright Night actually scary?

It's hard to be objective about such things, but I don't think I am someone who scares easily. I will certainly flinch if something unexpected happens, and I'm sure my heart rate spikes for a moment, but it only ever seems to last for a fleeting second before I return to my usual, rather stolid base state. I don't consider myself easily stressed out or particularly flappable.

In some ways, my unflappability is unfortunate: if I was one of those people who screams at everything, the heart rate data from the Fright Night probably would've been much more interesting.

Looking at the data from my Apple Watch, it would appear that the Fright Night wasn't very scary. Overall, I was a bit disappointed with the horror mazes: they would probably elicit a fair few screams if you're afraid of clowns, or not a fan of actors yelling in your face or chasing you down a dark corridor with a chainsaw, but they just didn't do it for me. This seems to be corroborated by my heart rate readings: after most mazes, my bpm was still around the "gentle exercise" baseline of 85pm.

The night-time roller coasters were a slightly different story, however. Curiously, my heart rate definitely climbed a little when I joined the queue for some of the roller coasters. My heart rate would start at 85pm and climb to around 95bpm when it was time to squeeze my brobdingnagian frame into those tiny seats. (Did you know that, at 196cm or 6'5", I'm technically too tall for some roller coasters? They still let me on, though, because the attendant is usually too short to see if my head is actually above the line. One day I'll get decapitated in a pitch-black tunnel... but not today!)

There was also one very interesting exception: at the end of the Saw ride, which features a Gerstlauer Euro-Fighter "beyond vertical" (100 degrees) drop, my heart rate spiked to 197bpm. I could certainly feel my heart racing, but I don't know if it was actually 197. (If there are any medical doctors in the house: would my heart explode at 197bpm? Or would it just be uncomfortably tachycardic?)

After most other roller coasters, my heart rate wasn't elevated anywhere near as much. The Swarm did manage to get my bpm up a little to around 120; Stealth, however, which launches you from 0 to 80mph (130km/h) in 1.9 seconds, seemingly didn't move me at all. Colossus, with a double corkscrew and the aforementioned quintuple heartline roll, made me feel sick but didn't appear to elevate my heart rate.

In conclusion, I am probably a cold, heartless bastard that ain't afraid of nothing. But this experiment has piqued my interest in the whole personal analytics/quantified self thing. I'm left wondering what other interesting stuff I could do with an Apple Watch on my wrist and other sensors strapped to my body. And next time I hit the amusement park, I'll have to wear a heart and breathing rate strap across my chest plus some kind of head-mounted camera that can track my pupil dilation. All along with my Apple Watch, of course.

Thorpe Park's Fright Nights run from October 9 through until November 1 until 10pm in the evening. Tickets start at about £30, and they go up to £90 if you want "fast track" access to all the roller coasters and mazes.

Listing image: Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony Editor of Ars Technica UK

Sebastian is the editor of Ars Technica UK. He usually writes about low-level hardware, software, and transport, but it is emerging science and the future of technology that really get him excited.

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