Museum offers fear and nausea in the name of science

First there was the vertiginous, 182ft steel and plastic slide offered as art. Now there is the trio of stomach-churning fairground rides being touted as science.

A week after the German artist Carsten Holler's installation of five slides was unveiled in the turbine hall of Tate Modern, the Science Museum began a mission to advance its cause, apparently by inducing fear and nausea in paying members of the public.

For each of the next three weeks, a fairground ride will be set up in the grounds of the museum's Dana Centre as part of a project to explain and enhance humanity's desire to recreate the adrenalin rushes of its early ancestors using technology.

Brendan Walker, the curator of the experiment and a self-styled "thrill engineer", said: "We live in a society which doesn't suffer fear of starvation or attack by wild animals. For the last 500 years fairgrounds have provided that rush of adrenalin instead. What we want to do is look at the physiology of what happens to the human body when you go on a fairground ride."

The series of experiments will fuel an emerging trend for adrenalin-spiking entertainment in the capital.

Tate Modern said all the time slots for its slide installation, described by the artist as a "playground for the body and the brain", have been full since it opened last week - representing at least 30,000 visitors.

The adults-only Science Museum project, costing £10 for a ride and food and drink (advisably in that order), will see randomly selected participants trapped into a specially-designed vest and helmet which monitors heart rate, stress levels and G-force as well as carrying a camera to record facial reactions.

The images and data will then be beamed on to a giant screen behind the fairground ride to be explained and dissected by experts in front of the paying audience.

The Independent experienced the first of the rides yesterday - a giant "cake mixer" called Miami Thrill, which rotates its human load through forces up to 2.5G (enough to briefly induce weightlessness, and mild queasiness).

Using data from the monitoring vest, organisers found that the average heart rate of participants was 130 beats per minute during the ride, compared with 90bpm when at rest. Stress levels rapidly increased as participants approached the ride but did not rise further when on board.

Tuvi Orbach, who designed the technology in conjunction with University College London Medical School, said: "It is typical for the heart beat to rapidly increase but what is interesting is the way we deal with stress.

"Sensors like this can allow you to learn to control your stress. Eventually they could be included in the rides themselves to allow the operators to adjust the machine for maximum enjoyment."

The museum experiment will also involve a ghost train to measure fear and the Booster, based on jet pilot training apparatus which subjects participants to 4G - equivalent to a Formula One racing car going around a corner at top speed. Whether it will succeed in casting new light on how best to stimulate the human mind remains to be seen.