After a multi-year development and pilot effort, Walt Disney World Parks and Resorts is ready to roll out its MagicBand across their Orlando theme parks. Leveraging Bluetooth and RF technology as wearable technology, the bands are designed to serve a myriad of purposes including a payment form, to mitigate ticket fraud, enhance the Fast Pass process, replace card entry forms, and eventually offer an even more personalized and interactive experience for park guests.
From The Next Web:
“When we decrease people’s anxiety, they have more fun at the park,” Staggs explained. The band is designed to help reduce the amount of time people spend strategizing and increase the time they spend enjoying the park.
Strategies like this point the way to how the digital experience is beginning to move outside of disconnected devices and onto individuals in order to enable personal feedback loops, create more convenient access points for information (whether its payments or security), and offer the a company enriched user data.
But payments and reservations aren’t the only things that the MagicBands are designed to improve. It will also enable things like a character calling your kid by name.
“The more that their visit can seem personalized, the better. If, by virtue of the MagicBand, the princess knows the kid’s name is Suzy..the experience becomes more personalized,” says Staggs.
This use case also illustrates how payments have become one function embedded inside of a broader range of uses enabled by proximity-based technologies and suggests that multi-application products are not only feasible, but desirable.
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