Disney MagicBands Wearable Tech Lets You Explore Disney In A New Way
In light of the recent Apple Watch unveiling, let's take a look at another wearable that is flying under the radar, specifically in Orlando. Florida's Disney World offers a lot to make it the "happiest place on earth." Recently, the park has been using its own wearable Disney MagicBands to create a new way for guests to interact with their Disney surroundings. They come in various colors with collectible straps so that everyone in your family should not only enjoy wearing MagicBands, but they will forget that they are actually wearing a smart device.
These MagicBands are available to guests at Disney's Magic Kingdom. If a guest signs ahead of time for Disney's Magical Express service, they get a MagicBand in the mail pre-loaded with all of their individual preferences. It not only replaces your paper trail of bookings and tickets within the resort, but it takes the place of your credit card. You can swipe your MagicBand for payment anywhere within the park.
On the surface, the MagicBands resemble a generic health tracker band that consumers have grown accustomed to wearing. Inside each MagicBand is an array of features including an RFID chip and radio frequency transmitter that can send signals 40 feet in all directions, just like a cordless phone. Like everything at Disney, these bands are designed to be carefree. Their interface should be intuitively simple to use. Simply touch the band to different access points around the park to interact with them. If there are no hiccups, the access point will flash a green light. If you need to scan your band again, the access point will flash a blue light. You'll never see any red lights at Disney World. Such lights are associated with a warning, or danger and have no place in the Magic Kingdom.
At one of Disney's restaurants, Be Our Guest, the Disney MagicBands work with the servers' iPhones to alert them of your presence. They can greet your family by name and know all of your food preferences before you have a chance to say a word. Disney's Imagineers have a reputation of being at the forefront of technology. Right now, the MagicBands are optimized to create the ultimate guest experience, but these bands may branch outside the park walls in the future. We're looking forward to seeing what new possibilities for wearable technology Disney can create for its MagicBands.
Source: Wired
