Editor’s note: Here’s the first post from our new-ish researcher, Tawny. She joined us back in September, just in time for OpenWorld. After her trip to Disney World, she talked eagerly about the MagicBand experience, and if you read here, you know I’m a fan of Disney’s innovative spirit.
Enjoy.
Planning a Disney World trip is no small feat. There are websites that display crowd calendars to help you find the best week to visit and the optimal parks to visit on each of those days so you can take advantage of those magic hours. Traveling with kids? Visiting during the high season? Not sure which FastPass+ to make reservations for?
There are annually updated guidebooks dedicated to providing you the most optimal attraction routes and FastPass+ reservations, based off of thousands of data points for each park. Beginning 2013, Disney introduced the MagicBand, a waterproof bracelet that acts as your entry ticket, FastPass+ holder, hotel key and credit card holder. The bands are part of The MyMagic+ platform, consisting of four main components: MagicBands, FastPass+, My Disney Experience, and PhotoPass Memory Maker. Passborterboard lists everything you can do with a MagicBand.
I got my chance to experience the MagicBand early this January.
These are both open edition bands. This means that they do not have customized lights or sounds at FP+ touchpoints. We bought them at the kiosk at Epcot after enviously looking on at other guests who were conveniently accessing park attractions without having to take out their tickets! It was raining, and the idea of having to take out anything from our bags under our ponchos was not appealing.
The transaction was quick and the cashier kindly linked our shiny new bands to our tickets. Freedom!!!
The band made it easy for us to download photos and souvenirs across all park attractions without having to crowd around the photo kiosk at the end of the day. It was great being able to go straight home to our hotel room while looking through our Disney photo book through their mobile app!
Test Track at Epcot made the most use of the personalization aspect of these bands. Before the rise, guests could build their own cars with the goal of outperforming other cars in 4 key areas: power, turn handling, environmental efficiency and responsiveness.
After test driving our car on the ride, there were still many things we could do with our car such as join a multiplayer team race…we lost 🙁
What was really interesting were guests were fortunate to show off personalized entry colors and sounds, a coveted status symbol amongst MagicBand collectors. The noise and colors was a mini attraction on its own! I wish our badge scanners said hi to us like this every morning…
When used in conjunction with My Disney Experience app, there can be a lot of potential:
- Order ahead food + scan to pick up or food delivery while waiting in a long line.
- Heart sensor + head facing camera to take pictures within an attractions to capture happy moments.
- Haptic feedback to tell you that your table is ready at a restaurant. Those pagers are bulky.
So what about MagicBands for the enterprise context?
Hospitals may benefit, but some argue that the MagicBand model works exclusively for Disney because of its unique ecosystem and the heavy cost it would take to implement it. The concept of the wearable is no different from the badges workers have now.
Depending on the permissions given to the badgeholder, she can badge into any building around the world.
What if we extend our badge capabilities to allow new/current employees to easily find team members to collaborate and ask questions?
What if the badge carried all of your desktop and environmental preferences from one flex office to the desk so you never have to set up or complain about the temperature ever again?
What if we could get a push notification that it’s our cafeteria cashier’s birthday as we’re paying and make their day with a “Happy Birthday?”
That’s something to think about.