At parks, Disney invests in interactive experiences

By Ian Hamilton Orange County Register

Later this year, guests at Walt Disney World in Florida will be given a smart wristband that gets them into the park, pays for food and merchandise, and grants access to their hotel room. The technology, part of a project called MyMagic+, will gather data about a guest's behavior to tailor more personalized experiences.

At the last two D23 expos in Anaheim in 2009 and 2011, Otto and Destini—two fully autonomous robots – greeted fans with unexpected jokes and answers. They listened to visitors and watched them for cues about what to say, and how to behave.

Disney, whose tradition of innovation stretches back to Walt Disney himself, certainly isn't the first to experiment with such technologies. But the company's ongoing plans to incorporate these and other ideas into the experiences of park and cruise-ship guests promise to be one of the more ambitious roll-outs yet of interactive technologies. Disney is banking on them to pull in a new generation raised on video games and iPod Touches, while delivering cost savings, managing crowds and delivering valuable insight into customer preferences.

The company isn't saying when smart wristbands might come to Anaheim. But park-goers will gradually notice Disney experiences that are more personalized, with various technologies deployed to create experiences that blur the line between what is reality and fantasy.

“Disneyland is built on Walt's model of television. It's just like watching TV. The scene unfolds in front of you,” said Len Testa, co-author of several unofficial guides to Disney parks. “It's all a passive experience. You see a presentation and you're done. What the parks lacked was interactivity – that's what these things bring.”

Take, for example, “Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom,” the premiere scavenger-hunt game at Disney World in Florida. Kids are given a random group of collectible cards that represent various “spells.” Then they venture out to defeat villains that are trying to take over the park. The bad guys magically appear in windows to interact with the card-carrying sorcerer.

The child presents the right card to proceed to the next step, as an invisible camera and image-recognition technology create the impression of casting a spell. The game can be played in easy, medium and difficult settings, just like a video game. On “easy,” it might take four hours to complete a game; the difficult version could take 12. Disney has had no trouble getting kids to stick with it, according to Jonathan Ackley, a senior show producer at Disney who worked on the game.

“With the technology that's emerging, it's freeing us to get up off our couch and become an active participant in a world and that world may be hidden from everyone else,” Ackley said. “In a way that makes it more special because only we know about it. It's just a new way we can tell stories at Disney.”

With MyMagic+, the wristbands eventually will accompany a mobile phone app that lets visitors reserve firework- and parade-viewing areas, set up a meeting with Mickey or pick rides so as to skip the line. In addition, the band will gather information about a guest's behavior that could be key to even more personalized experiences in the future – a princess wowing a little girl by asking whether she enjoyed her pancakes for breakfast, for instance. The New York Times said analysts peg the total cost of the project at $800 million to $1 billion.

“It serves as your wallet, it serves as your ticket and it gives us the ability, with the voluntary information that you provide to us, to enable personalization and customization, which we have not been able to do before,” said Disney CEO Bob Iger in his February conference call with analysts. “A lot the features of this product will actually be rolled out over a long period of time.”

Disney has a rich tradition of evaluating every kind of technology it comes across for how it can be used invisibly to tell a story, according to Disney historian and former Imagineer Jeff Kurtti. And dating back to Disneyland's animatronic Abe Lincoln, Tomorrowland, and 1982's opening of EPCOT in Florida, the company has put a premium on visions of the future. With the rise of personal computers, cell phones and the Internet, though, the company was hard-pressed to build experiences that matched what visitors already had in their homes, say some longtime Disney watchers.

“The pace of innovation is so much faster now that there's no way Disney could keep up with that,” said Testa. “How do you present the future when it's going to be here in six months?”

Today the company is facing a world where most people walking around its parks have a handheld, Internet-connected computer begging to draw their attention away from the immersive, and lucrative, experience at hand.

“It's definitely harder today and it takes more effort on our part today than it did in the past,” said Scott Trowbridge, vice president of research and development at Disney's Glendale offices. “Our obligation to keep pace or beat that pace is also our opportunity to create new forms of magic ... as technology progresses, so does the size of our tool box.”

One such tool is the Digital Immersive Showroom, a room at Disney's Glendale offices that's akin to the Holodeck from “Star Trek.” Projectors beam images onto tall, white walls and the floor. People using the showroom wear 3D glasses and a hat that tracks their location. The technology allows Disney workers to experience a place like Cars Land before it was ever built. They can walk from one side of the room to the other and their perspective will change as if they're walking through the actual park. The technology, however, is limited to only a single user – not enough to become an attraction that can handle thousands of people each day.

In contrast, Disney's park in Tokyo last year started beaming projections at the walls of Goofy's house to give kids the illusion they're splattering them with paint. No special hats or glasses are necessary – and, critically for Disney, there's no limitation to the number of people who can see it.

“How do we take you from almost an invisible audience member to an active part of the story world we're trying to immerse you in?” Trowbridge said. “And then things start to get really interesting on a whole bunch of fronts. How do we deliver that? How do people want that? How does that become something that is scalable?”

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