SOUND
Spatial audio assumes a listener who stays put. Ride vehicles do not. How placement and delay change when the audience is travelling.
Almost everything written about spatial audio assumes a listener in a seat. The sweet spot is a place. You mix for it, you measure from it, and the further someone sits from it the worse their evening gets. That model survives a cinema and a concert hall perfectly well, and it falls apart the moment the audience is on a track.
In a moving vehicle there is no sweet spot, there is a path. Every listener passes through the same sequence of positions but each one arrives at a slightly different moment, and the relationship between them and any given speaker changes continuously. The thing you are designing is not a field. It is a sequence of arrivals.
Nothing about that is exotic until you notice that the vehicle usually does not run at a constant speed. It accelerates, it holds, it slows for a scene, and on some systems it stops entirely if the block ahead is occupied. So the audience's position is a function of time only in the loosest sense, and any design that assumes a fixed timeline is designing for a ride that is not the one being built.
That changes what you place and where. Sources tied to the vehicle travel with the audience and stay stable, which makes them the right home for anything that has to be understood — a voice, a cue, a warning. Sources tied to the room are the ones that create place, and they only work if the guest is inside their coverage at the moment they fire. A line that lands beautifully in the middle of a zone is inaudible two seconds early.
Delay stops being a correction and becomes a compositional tool. If you know the vehicle's position over time, you know when a sound should reach it, and you can build the arrival rather than accept it. That is a very different job from aligning speakers to a room, and it fails in a way room alignment never does: not as a smear, but as a moment that happens to nobody.
Two practical consequences follow. Vehicle-mounted sources should carry anything the guest must hear regardless of where they are, because those channels do not care where the vehicle has got to. Room sources should carry place, atmosphere and anything you would rather the guest half-heard than missed entirely — because if the timing slips, an ambient bed slipping is survivable and a line of dialogue slipping is not.
The practical consequence is that audio cannot be specified separately from the ride profile. If the vehicle speed changes late in the project, and it usually does, the sound design changes with it. Anyone who has treated audio as a package to be dropped in at the end has learned this expensively.
The other habit worth forming is checking coverage by walking the path rather than measuring from a point. A plan view with overlapping circles looks convincing and tells you almost nothing about what a person experiences travelling through it at four metres a second. Walking it with the show running finds the dead spot, the doubled arrival and the moment where two zones argue with each other, and it finds them in about twenty minutes.