The Orlando Eye

This guide to The Orlando Eye traces its first rider, a thirteen-year-old girl fighting leukemia who was chosen to test the very first capsule days before the wheel opened to the public on April 29, 2015. It follows the wheel through an identity crisis of its own, five name changes in under a decade before Merlin Entertainments, the company also behind London's Eye, bought it back and restored its original name in 2024. The four-hundred-foot structure itself arrived on more than a hundred fifty trailers, hauling roughly three million pounds of steel parts.