Disney is rolling out new technology in an effort to reduce guest phone use during their theme park day in a test with park guests. One year ago, Disney leadership began acknowledging what many of us already knew. The need to use your smartphone for everything can take you out of your theme park day with family and friends. The head of the Disney theme parks and head of Walt Disney Imagineering both commented on the need for a reduction in phone use in the past year.
Now, we have details on the new technology rolling out very soon to some park guests in a test and a look at the new offering that is meant to reduce guest phone time. The tool is more impressive than I was expecting and is arriving more fully formed than I could have hoped. The offering comes as Disney is making an effort to listen to more guest feedback and taking action on complaints. Mickey Visit brings you the latest Disney news and planning resources, including Disney World adding new playgrounds with amenities for parents and kids, and Disney World November popcorn buckets.
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Disney Wants to Reduce Heads Down Phone Use During Theme Park Day
Disney has integrated the mobile app into every part of the theme park day. Everything from looking for information about your visit, like nearby restaurants or wait times for rides, to more active uses like pulling Lightning Lanes and mobile ordering food, has been packed into the park destination app. Most times, a tech-savvy guest ends up navigating the parks for their entire group. This person ends up on their phone quite a bit in an effort to deliver a seamless day for their guests. This is a great tool for power users and a complex one for new visitors.
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Leadership at Disney has acknowledged that this removes you from the rest of your group and the theme park experiences that they are trying to deliver.
Earlier this year, Thomas Mazloum, now Chairman of the Disney theme park division, shared with us that he understands both the value of the technology for the guest experience and the complaints about excessive screen time. He explicitly said that they are actively working to reduce the amount of time that guests spend on their cell phones and that he is personally always pushing for a reduction of tasks required on the phone.
Mazloum said we already live in a world where people are constantly scrolling on their phones. Disney is a place where guests can leave that behind.
He said that while adding technology can simplify the guest experience, the technology should not be implemented at the cost of emotional connections guests make with each other at the parks.
Last year, Walt Disney Imagineering President Bruce Vaughn acknowledged this, saying, “A big differentiator for us is that you’re there together with friends and family and people that you care about, and every time you have to look down at a device or a phone, it breaks that spell.”
At the time, he pointed to new technology coming and said that “extended reality is gonna reinforce the shared experience.”
The vision presented at the time was of a bold layer of intelligence that seemed theoretical and far off from being available for guests. I believed that the leadership wanted to reduce phone use, but I didn’t see a clear path to actually reducing it based on how enmeshed the technology and the app on the phone has become with the parks experience.
Now, somewhat to my surprise, that improvement to the app phone experience is here and a relatively fully formed version is rolling out to some guests soon in a test environment.
Last week, Mickey Visit was among a small group of media who got a preview of the new offering rolling out. We are breaking this news for the first time. The new service seems promising and impactful to the guest experience.
Disney is launching a new app called Disney Imagineering Labs. The app provides an environment for Walt Disney Imagineering to test entertaining and functional experiences with guests. The results of the tests could be rolled into the destination apps for Disneyland, Walt Disney World, and the other Disney theme parks.
Instead of launching a finished product, Imagineers are building experiences in a digital ‘laboratory’ environment, where guests can utilize the offering and give feedback to inform how the experiences evolve.
The experiences in the app are meant to give teams the ability to test if they are delivering an experience that guests want. The app also has the benefit of showing technology progress that is visible to guests and providing immediate utility from the work.
Initially, the app is available only to age 13+ Disneyland Magic Key pass holders. All guests will be able to use the app in early 2027, per the app store description.
There are two new experiences launching with the app. The key one related to our discussion around the reduction of phone usage is the Disneyland Enchanted Guide. This is a utility-focused addition. There is also the Secrets of the Spire in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge which we have details coming about soon.
We sat down with Asa Kalama, Executive, Creative & Interactive Experiences, Walt Disney Imagineering, to learn more about the new app launching and the enchanted guide.
He explained the app: “We are taking a lab-focused approach to the app. The idea here is that the content that lives inside of these experiments are in a much more raw state than we would typically share with our guests. As someone who has spent much of my career in the Research & Development lab in Walt Disney Imagineering, that is very exciting for us. This allows us to solicit real, authentic feedback from our guests, understand how they’re engaging with these experiences, where they’re successful, where they may need some additional improvement, and then based off that feedback and how people are engaging with the experience make decisions about what we want to do with those. Do we want to turn those into real products and experiences that guests can enjoy? Or are there things that we want to deprecate or take back to the drawing board to continue to refine? This is a very new thing for us. Typically we like to put everything out with a high degree of polish and finish.”
Kalama then turned specifically to the Disneyland Enchanted Guide experiment, saying, “Really the goal here is: the point of being in the park is to be in the park and to not be on your phone. How do we get the information that you need as a park guest whether you are a Magic Key Holder or this is your first time without having to spend a lot of time inside the app searching for that information?”
Here’s how the new Disneyland Enchanted Guide works. When you open the experiment in the app, there is a simple push-to-talk button or type-to-text box. This sits overlaid on the Disneyland map. The app will surface whatever helpful information guests would need throughout their park day.
“It is everything from where can I find a churro nearby to what’s the current wait time for Tiana’s Bayou Adventure,” Kalama continued. “The goal is to help you problem solve and get the answer as quickly as possible without needing to understand the business rules of how Disney works and functions. Or even how the app is organized. It allows you to surface all of that detail directly, when and where you need it.”
I took the app out into the park to test the tool. Initially I used it just on my phone and then after that used the voice and vision feature on Meta Ray-Ban Glasses to enhance the offering. Meta is the wearables partner for the app.
Some of the highlights of the app include being able to pull information seamlessly without going through different pages, finding directions on the map, asking for wait times and wait time recommendations, getting fun facts and history, visually identifying something in the parks with a photo, setting reminders and alerts, and more.
I’ll go through specific examples of each of those things and at the same time explain how they help to keep you off your phone and accomplish tasks faster.
Pulling information – I was able to ask for nearby restaurant recommendations based on healthy food choices. The app recommended restaurants and gave specific menu items as examples of why it recommended those restaurants for me. I could also ask for the nearest corn dog. The app also was able to pull live wait times. The only thing that it struggled with right now was pulling mobile order return times when I attempted to stump it by asking for an immediate return restaurant.
Directions on Map – The experiment home screen is a map, and when you ask questions about where something is, it will show you the walking directions with a line on the map.
Wait Time recommendations – After asking for the Peter Pan wait time, I asked if it was better to ride it right now or wait until later and the tool recommended riding in that moment because the wait was projected to be higher later in the day. Similarly, for another ride it recommended riding later because the wait times were projected to drop.
Fun Facts and history – The app is loaded with some fun facts and history and is also able to correct urban legends. For instance, I was joking around with an Imagineer and we asked it if Walt Disney’s frozen head was actually real and buried in the park. It corrected me confidently. Later it gave an incorrect detail about another fun fact, but then corrected itself later in conversation. There are still some bugs in this area, which illustrates the point of having it roll out in this Walt Disney Imagineering app instead of to all guests.
Reminders – The app is able to remind you that you have a dining reservation at a specific time and build in time to get to the restaurant based on your location in the park. This should give guests peace of mind to be able to look at phones less.
Alerts – “Let me know when wait time for Big Thunder Mountain falls below 40 minutes.” The app will push you a notification on your phone with an alert that a ride has a falling wait time if you ask it to. This seems like a big time savings to avoid looking at your phone over and over again. Last month we were at Walt Disney World and Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind was closed at EPCOT for much of the morning. We constantly were refreshing the app looking to see if it opened. This would have saved all that.
Photo capture – Guests can take a photo of something in the app and ask what it is or where they are and the app will be able to give you an answer based on the photo and your location in the park.
There is another layer that makes this experience even better. You are able to pair the app with the new Meta Ray-Ban Glasses or any other smart device. When paired, you are able to have a completely hands-free experience. Guests will just say a wake word that activates the experiment and the voice will be there ready to answer any question.
“We’ve built these incredible, robust rich worlds. We want the focus of the experience to be as heads up and engaged in the environment and the people that you know and love and the reason that you came to the park as possible and to keep you off of a screen,” Kalama shared.
Another Disney technology leader who worked on this project shared that he used the Meta Ray-Ban Glasses all day with the experience and was able to be completely engaged with his family without taking out his phone for most of the day. He gave the example of being hands-free with their baby. They needed to change a diaper and by talking to the glasses he was able to find the Baby Care Center without even looking at his phone for directions.
Right now, this service is set up in the separate app from the Disneyland app, but in the future we anticipate that it will roll out to both the Disneyland app and Walt Disney World app if it is successful.
Because it is in a separate app, the experience right now is only on a session basis, meaning that it doesn’t automatically plug into the rest of your day. That means that right now it isn’t taking action on your behalf or coming in with a pre-existing knowledge of your interests and profile. This could all come in the future. The experiment right now does learn over the course of the session. So, if you say you have a lunch reservation in the morning, it will remember to prompt you for that later in the day.
The app is meant to build and test this new service. When guests close out of one of the experiments, they are prompted to give feedback.
The new service is set up in a way that it can be used by all guests. For power users there are options to set reminders and notifications when certain things happen at the parks, for instance when a certain ride wait time drops or for your reservation time. For new guests, the tool is simple and intuitive and is ready to answer basic questions without forcing guests to know how the parks work.
The ability to ask questions and receive push notifications will reduce the need to check the app in many instances by setting the option to receive alerts for things like wait times hitting a lower time.
The concept of this new enchanted guide has advanced far faster than we expected from pretty theoretical last November when we first heard about it to a product launching with guests for testing a year later.
Without this app, the current state of technology across travel in theme parks, hotels, and airlines rewards power users. Access to make changes and improve your experience is right at the tip of your fingers with less friction than ever for those who know how to maneuver. Disney apps have delivered this also with the ability to secure the best Lightning Lane return times, dining reservations, and mobile order times by refreshing and being on your phone. This has happened so much so that third parties have popped up to help guests manage Lightning Lane and secure dining reservations.
For super users who visit the parks frequently, the combination of knowledge about the apps and the outside tools means that you are able to secure a near-perfect parks experience. There is a toll even for these most frequent visitors, though. The easy access to knowledge can mean that the power user will spend more time with their phone than with their group in the parks.
As the person who is typically in that role for my family, the spell of the theme park can be broken for that person as Bruce Vaughn said. Now, this new service seems to be a way to reduce some of this problem and to give ease of access to newer park guests.
This app also balances support for the power user with the first-time guest. For me, it is easy to say that the tools right now are fantastic and give great access to different services in the park, but how does a first-time guest use them? The current structure of the app and the various screens can be overwhelming. The lead Imagineer on the project shared that this is meant to take away the need for guests to know the business rules and organizational structure in the app. To me, this feels like the low-hanging-fruit win of rolling out this offering.
Right now, the guide doesn’t integrate with booking Lightning Lanes and the management of that is a big part of my current app screen time, but perhaps that will come. I also wonder if there could be a future setting for the option to get a notification when a new reservation time opens for a restaurant. For both of these, you run into the reality that if everyone has notifications on then they are not effective for anyone. For the power user, I expect that the need to manually refresh and be on your phone will remain the best way to secure a great day for your group. There needs to be some barrier to securing Lightning Lane times and restaurant reservations otherwise everyone would do that and with the capacity of rides, that isn’t possible.
The best that we can hope for from the Enchanted Guide and other associated improvements is a reduction in screen time for the average park guest. It seems like it is going to accomplish that.
When I first reported on Disney’s plans in this area last year, I wrote that I wasn’t sure about “adding an even more persistent layer between me and the rest of my group” by wearing the Ray-Ban glasses. After having tried them and seeing the phone offering, I see that the glasses just feel like sunglasses and the guide doesn’t feel like an interruption to my day. With them I was also able to easily just take them off and ask the chat on my phone when needed.
Generally, I am impressed with this product and look forward to it being successful with all Magic Key pass holders during the initial test and then hopefully seeing it roll out to the destination apps. We hope that it rolls out to Magic Key pass holders soon and is quickly moved from this app to the destination apps. The vision is here and the use case is clear.
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