Disneyland Resort’s “Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge” will be among the first attractions constructed in tandem with digital experiences, app games and interactive surroundings.
“We need to do everything in Star Wars the right way and keep it within story and make you feel a part of it,” Eric Bautista, director, digital experience, told the Business Journal last week at the theme park.
He leads Disney Parks and Resort Digital, a team of four scattered across Glendale, Florida and Seattle in charge of the company’s latest app rollout, core requirements and integration, and general product road map.
The digital team developed the Play Disney Parks app, which launched June 30 and features in-park games, trivia, group challenges, interactive maps, more than 200 songs curated from classics to unreleased archives, and fun facts.
Glendale-based Parks Technology is about a 20-person outfit of developers and back-end specialists who operationalize the app and other digital experiences.
Imagineering, also based at Disney’s sprawling Glendale campus, is a group of seven responsible for the story and arc, and bringing park installations and interactive set designs to life.
Though those dedicated teams are small in number, their influence is immense.
The highly anticipated 14-acre Star Wars land, whose fictional setting is dubbed Black Spire Outpost, is more than three years in the making and the largest-ever themed expansion at the Disney location in Anaheim.
The blockbuster project will open next summer.
“A lot of what is being developed out there has the Play Disney Parks app in mind,” said Bautista as he leads a private media tour through California Adventure to explain, promote and demo the new app on a hot, humid early morning.
As the group waits in line at Space Mountain, Bautista launches the app. The goal: build a space ship through prompts, like replicating symbols on nearby walls into the app and flipping digital squares from red to blue.
Each challenge met adds another part to the space ship. This challenge culminates in a space ship race against others waiting in line. At Disneyworld in Florida, the race is beamed through an overhead projector.
In queue at Peter Pan’s Flight, the group passes around a smartphone, answering playful questions about teammates and completing drawings. When the challenge is met—in this case amassing enough pixy dust—a special surprise greets visitors at a lantern post just before boarding the ride.
“This is a great opportunity to turn wait time into play time by actively engaging the people you’re with and the things around you,” said Josh Gorin, executive research and development Imagineer with Walt Disney Imagineering. “We were really going with a family game night vibe.”
The interactive exchanges rely on a series of beacons at installations that will pulse or alert visitors that an experience is nearby. They also notify the park that visitors are in queue.
The Play Disney Parks team has been working closely with the design team on Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge to build a layer of interactivity and game play in Black Spire Outpost, a notorious stop for traders, adventurers, and smugglers traversing the largest settlement on planet Batuu.
“Play Disney Parks is going to be a very important tool in your journey as you navigate the place and interact with its population,” Gorin said. “This is really the beginning of something we hope will be very special and big.”
Honor and reputation will be big themes at Black Spire.
“The play app is core to that,” said Bautista, who helped create the Disneyland app that launched four years ago and the MaxPass introduced last year. “It becomes one of your key elements to holding and deriving that reputation.”
