Walt Disney World fans have a lot of complaints and criticism for the company, and in a rare turn of events, the head of Imagineering agrees with them about one of the biggest problem points with the guest experience in the parks. Unfortunately, one of his proposed solutions isn’t going to be well received, but the first step is acknowledging there’s an issue.
Frankly, we’re thankful to hear this. As we’ve covered in Top 10 Guest Complaints About Walt Disney World and other roundups of the biggest annual fan concerns about WDW, we’ve been receiving negative reader feedback at a far historically-high rate over the last 5 years. Essentially, since the honeymoon phase of the post-COVID reopening wore off and fans started realizing temporary changes were going to become permanent.
The #4 entry on last year’s version of the biggest complaints list was “too much screen time.” Refreshing for better Lightning Lanes. Mobile Order for counter service restaurants and Merchandise Mobile Checkout to buy stuff. Checking Walk-up Waitlist for new table service availability. Looking at wait times and showtimes. And so on and so forth.
It’s been our position that this is both an obvious issue and an overblown one. So many entries on the above list are entirely optional. You can opt-out of Lightning Lanes completely, there are cash registers for counter service restaurants and merchandise, ADRs can be made pre-trip, and wait times boards are throughout the park (if you even need them in the first place).
On the other hand, optional might need air quotes around it. Ignore all of those app features to your own detriment, as they can help simplify and streamline your day. Not only that, but FOMO makes it difficult to opt-out of Lightning Lanes or anything else. The compulsion to check the My Disney Experience app is a direct result of the deliberate choices that Walt Disney World has made.
For years, we’ve said that Walt Disney World leans too heavily on technology (ironic, since Disney is objectively awful at it) and not enough on tactile experiences. To paraphrase my favorite Walt Disney quote, “it’s people that make the dream a reality.” The best memories are formed as a result of interpersonal moments, and so much emotional resonance is derived from guests connecting with others.
Even if people can’t put their finger on it, so much of what differentiates and defines the appeal of Walt Disney World is the ‘little things’ that bring them together with each other and shared spaces. Big new rides get people to take the trip, but it’s the myriad little things and those connections that convince them to return.
Then, of course, there are the themed environments that Imagineering worked so hard to create. By having their faces buried in their phones while in line or strolling through the park, guests are missing so much of the defining features of Walt Disney World.
It’s not just about racing from ride to ride and accomplishing those, checklist-style, with the shortest wait times possible. It’s the spaces in between–the breathing room and richly themed environments–that make Disney, Disney. If guests are overlooking that, they’re missing a lot of what separates Walt Disney World from regional parks.
Walt Disney World now nudges guests towards spending way too much time with their faces buried in their phones. These new app features are great in isolation, and benefit the company by improving efficiency and cutting costs. However, the totality of all of this amounts to Walt Disney World effectively leaning into its biggest weaknesses (technology and isolation) and away from its strengths (richly themed environments and togetherness).
It might look good in the quarterly financials, but all of this technology does come with a long-term cost. And now, it would seem that someone high-up in the company actually agrees with the spirit of this sentiment…
Walt Disney Imagineering President Bruce Vaughn commented on exactly this issue, and how phones inhibit the guest experience in the parks. Here’s what he said:
Extended reality is gonna reinforce the shared experience. 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 look have to look down at a device or a phone, it breaks that spell. If you can use extended reality, I never stop looking at the environment I’m in or at the people I’m with, it’s gonna be less disruptive.
Asa Kalama, Executive Creative Director at Walt Disney Imagineering, spoke about the possibilities of the new partnership with Disney, Meta and Ray-Ban.
We have a really wonderful partnership with Meta to leverage their Ray-Ban smart glasses for both guest-facing applications and also behind the scenes design applications as well. What’s great about these glasses is they’ve got cameras in them, microphones, and speakers. For guests, it allows us to put a virtual theme park guide in their ear.
The glasses can enhance the ways we tell stories for our guests, unlocking a world of information about the land that they’re in. Just by looking around, I can ask questions about some of the architectural details, and I get the answer right in my ear.
Maybe I wanna learn a little bit more about a merchandise item for my child. All I have to do is look at it, ask, “tell me more information about it.” Then, right in my ear, I get all of the product information.
Kalama later added: “if we’re doing our jobs properly, all of the technology goes away and our guests get immersed in the story we’re trying to tell.” Another Imagineer was quick to say that Disney “is not just using technology for technology’s sake.” Instead, Disney is using technology “in service of story” they’re trying to tell.
This is great sentiment, and I absolutely agree with it. The only problem is that I’ve been a Disney Adult for two decades now, and I’ve seen countless examples of the technological tail wagging the dog in the parks. Things like the entire NextGen initiative to Made with Magic/Glow with the Show to Genie and more. There are countless examples of abandoned technology that the company invested big bucks into, seemingly failing to take into account whether it was something guests would actually embrace.
Vaughn and Kalama were just two of the Imagineers who covered this and adjacent topics as part of the new ‘Inside Imagineering Research & Development’ episode of the “We Call it Imagineering” YouTube series. During that, Disney shared an inside look at its once-secret internal R&D arm, while also highlighting prolific partnerships with tech companies including Nvidia, Google, and Meta.
Our Commentary
I want to start by saying that I’ve enjoyed every episode of “We Call It Imagineering,” but the ‘Inside Imagineering Research & Development’ episode is the first one that really felt like it was aimed at two distinct audiences. There’s the fans, obviously, and we no doubt ate up this behind-the-scenes look at what Disney is doing with robotics.
At the same time, a lot of this seemed to be aimed squarely at investors, as a part of Disney’s years-long quest to be viewed (and valued) as a technology company. Heck, they even got Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to say, “at the core, Disney is a technology company.” Wall Street’s favorite CEO said the thing! That’s gotta be worth at least a 2% boost to Disney’s share price!!!
In all seriousness, I can’t imagine there are many (any?) diehard Disney fans who were on the edges of their seats waiting to hear Jensen Huang’s take on Imagineering. If you gave me 10,000 guesses as to who would be featured in this episode, I wouldn’t have picked him. And yet, from Disney’s perspective–since it’s serving multiple audiences with content like this–that was probably the most consequential portion of the episode.
(One of my favorite writers, Matt Levine of Bloomberg, routinely writes about the circularity of AI deals. Those sometimes involve partnerships with Nvidia and the promise to purchase their chips. That’s not the nature of the Disney-Nvidia relationship, but it’s close enough that this video reminded me of it. Point being, AI is definitely not a bubble. Nothing to see here, folks, just some totally normal pumping of stock prices.)
The Meta x Ray-Ban smart glasses feel similarly. That this has been deemed a marquee corporate alliance for the Walt Disney Company (because Meta is a big deal), so they’re supposed to throw resources at it and tout it whenever possible.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if Meta is underwriting all of the research & development that Disney is doing, and whatever the consumer product ends up being. There’s a tremendous amount of value to Meta in having trusted brands lend their goodwill to this product and normalize it, as Meta isn’t exactly a beloved American institution and this product isn’t something anyone asked for. So it’s going to take time and effort to reach a critical mass.
If this is sounding familiar already, it’s because there’s overlap between the Meta x Ray-Ban smart glasses and Apple Vision Pro, which we discussed a couple of years ago when Disney announced a creative partnership for that product. I expressed skepticism at the time, just as I had done previously with Disney’s forays into the metaverse, Cinderella Castle Mural of Memories NFT, Prime-Style Membership Program, AI Task Force, and so on and so forth.
What I wrote about Apple Vision Pro more or less applies to the Meta x Ray-Ban smart glasses. And I’ll be honest, I am openly hoping for both to fail so spectacularly that tech companies don’t try this nonsense again for another decade or two.
For all of its promise and potential to bring us together, technology has done as much or more to isolate us. We walk around all day with our faces buried in screens; rather than chatting with strangers in face-to-face settings, we pick up our phones the moment there’s a brief lull in conversation.
Our fixation with the virtual world has stressed the social fabric, and we are collectively worse for it–even as some aspects of our lives have unquestionably improved thanks to technology.
Smart glasses obviously are less obtrusive than clunky Apple Vision Pro headsets. They nevertheless will isolate people from one another in public spaces if widely adopted and used in day-to-day life.
If products like this become socially acceptable to wear and interact with in public, we will lose more of the small but meaningful interactions that make us human. That might sound hyperbolic, but the concerns are well-founded. This is precisely what the documentary “Her” was talking about.
Disney and Meta can pretend that the future is a world where we’re freed from our screens and talking to an AI copilot as we interact with our family and friends, all while quickly learning about the world around us. Maybe they’re right! Perhaps that’s how it’ll happen.
In my view, the more likely outcome is that this isolates people even further. That instead of talking to one another, striking up a conversation with fellow guests or asking questions of Cast Members, everyone retreats to their AI assistants to interact with. That we become less social with actual humans, siloing ourselves off because our agreeable AI companions are easier to talk to.
Again, this might sound like doom and gloom. But does anyone actually think that social media made us more sociable? Or that any emerging technology in the last couple of decades has made us less, not more, addicted to devices? Do you truly believe that Meta wants you to spend less time using its products and more time immersed in reality?
These trend lines are only going in one direction–at least, if the companies behind them have their ways. They can say otherwise, but they don’t exactly have strong track records with the truth.
However, that comes with a very big “if.” Smart glasses are more likely to become socially acceptable to wear in public spaces than Apple Vision Pro (at least with its currently form factor). There’s no doubt about that. But that’s only because most people don’t realize you’re wearing them.
I would imagine that it’d be a different story entirely if you got into a crowded queue and started asking questions to your sunglasses. As other guests start looking at you like you’re a crazy person, go ahead and try explaining that you’re talking to your “smart” sunglasses. See how well that goes over.
Obviously, I don’t speak for the park-going public, but if I had such an interaction, I would move away from the person in question. Mostly because I don’t want to be in their field of view being watched over by Mark Zuckerberg. But partly because I have certain preconceived notions about someone who would carry on a conversation with their sunglasses. Maybe I’m alone in this, but I doubt it. If you already have these sunglasses and love them, more power to you. Perhaps you’re seeing the world in a new way; it’s worth acknowledging that the reverse might also be true.
A decade ago, Google Glass learned precisely that lesson–that this kind of wearable was simply a bridge too far for average Americans. Google Glass was a spectacular failure, and the people who wore that nascent version of this tech were viewed as creeps and weirdos. But Meta and Ray-Ban are more mainstream, and perhaps partners like Disney will further normalize this type of wearable.
Or maybe tech evangelists in Silicon Valley are truly disconnected from the rest of human civilization, unable to see beyond their own bubbles where products like this capture the imagination and are deemed the future of humanity.
The majority of average Americans are weirded out by this type of thing, do not view it as the logical evolution of the smart device, and will never adopt it.
While I don’t think there’s any putting the genie back in the bottle when it comes to the ubiquitousness of technology in society–nor should there be, as there are tangible benefits–I do think that people are becoming, and will continue to become, more cognizant of the dangers of living online and benefits of disconnecting.
This is already happening. The first generation of kids exposed to social media and phones at young ages are now parents ourselves, and we’ve seen this firsthand. Phone-free schools are already increasingly common, but there’s a growing push to make schools screen-free entirely. And at least in our circle, most parents significantly limit screen time, or don’t allow it at all.
This may seem beside the point, or to reinforce the desire for something like smart glasses, but it’s really not. The underlying sentiment is a skepticism about these tech companies and the addictiveness of their products. If you have any doubt about this, consider researching how tech executives restrict their own children’s use of these devices–or common policies around Silicon Valley school districts.
It’s not just Millennial parents, the same trends are happening among younger people. Gen Z is more technologically literate than older generations, and they have a clearer view of these products and companies like Meta.
And there’s certainly no reason to believe that older generations will be the early adopters of things like smart glasses, giving them the necessary market penetration. So who, exactly, is this for? What’s the path to it becoming as popular as the iPod or iPhone?
It’s my fairly strong belief that there isn’t one. That the Meta x Ray-Ban smart glasses will be the best-selling version of this product, but that it won’t have even 1% of the market penetration as the smart phone. And from that perspective alone, this is DOA as being the future of the theme park experience.
This cannot be what ‘breaks the spell’ (I realize I’m using this differently than Vaughn, but I found his turn of phrase apt–albeit in a different direction) of guests being glued to their phones, as not enough guests will use it for it to make a meaningful difference. It’s like the notion that Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser, Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge Datapad, Play Disney Parks, or any other past efforts at creating virtual worlds within the physical confines of Walt Disney World were the future of theme parks.
An impossibility based on scale alone. Even with more charitable assumptions than I’m willing to make, it’s highly unlikely that there will ever be enough uptake for something like this to be what resolves the problem of excessive screen time.
Perhaps Disney has been paid enough ZuckBucks and such a Walt Disney World application for the Meta x Ray-Ban smart glasses will come to fruition, but it’ll only work for fewer than 5% of guests. And probably the ones least inclined to be on their phones less.
Ultimately, I’m heartened that Imagineering President Bruce Vaughn recognizes that excessive screen time is a problem with the guest experience, and something that actively undercuts what his division creates. At the same time, I’m also unconvinced that he has any realistic solutions to address this, or that the powers that be view this as a bug as opposed to a feature. Given that, the most likely outcome is more technology as opposed to less, and the hope that some of that will somehow be a net positive for the parks…and humanity. I don’t like our odds.
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YOUR THOUGHTS
Thoughts on Disney partnering on Meta on the Ray-Ban smart glasses? Are you a fan of this idea as a way to reduce screen time, or do you think it’ll only create more isolation? Are you a big fan of “extended reality” or is it not your cup of tea? Any Walt Disney World or Disneyland use cases that would make smart glasses appealing to you? Do you agree or disagree with our assessment? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!
