 Hi, everybody. My name is Emily Salvador. I'm a second-year master's student in the object-based media group. I am so excited to bring some of my friends from Walt Disney Imagineering here to speak to you all today about experiential storytelling. I wanted to thank a couple of people, so thanks to my friends, family, and colleagues at the lab who are watching both in person and online. Hi mom and dad. And yeah, and so we're gonna have a live Q&A panel at the end of this talk. If you want to use the hashtag MLTalks on Twitter, go ahead. And then we have a website that's gonna be posted on the screen up there with a with a link to get to. So Disney recently became a member of the Media Lab through Michael Abrams at the Walt Disney Company, and we're very happy for them to join our member family. And now I'm going to have Sarah Thatcher, Dave Fisher, and Amy Jupiter introduce themselves. Thanks so much, Emily. Thanks for having us here. This is really great. We're really, this is what a sensational place to be. Thank you all for opening your, opening your labs to us, inviting us in, and coming to hear us talk. My name is Sarah Thatcher. I'm a creative director at Walt Disney Imagineering Research and Development. Oh, yes, thanks for having us. I don't want to make any gender assumptions, but you might know who I am based on the names that are up there. I'm the guy. I'm Dave Fisher. I am a story editor. I am in the story development studio at Walt Disney Imagineering, and we'll talk more about that later. Hi, I'd like to also thank you guys for having us. I'm Amy Jupiter, and I'm an executive producer with Walt Disney Imagineering. Next question. Time's up. Exactly. And before we get too deep into the talk, I am just like overwhelmingly happy by how many people have showed up. We're working on getting more chairs, so hang tight, and head on up to the fourth floor because there's a little bit more space up there. Great, so let's get started. Earlier today, we were talking to Joey Ido, the director of the lab, and he mentioned sort of the driving forces of the media lab is uniqueness, impact, and magic. And I wanted to ask each of you what those words mean to you and your role as Imagineers. I want to start. I just want to talk a little bit about, I think, unique. And people often ask us about what the Disney difference is. And I think that we take very traditional things and use them uniquely. Uniqueness is a part of sort of what Imagineering is, being a state of mind, so using things in unique ways. And then having them impact our guests. And magic, obviously, unexplained science. And so those actually are really meaningful words to us as well, I think. I think you're probably going to, there's going to be a pattern here when we start to answer these questions. Because one of the reasons is I probably am going to be providing a lot of the historical perspective on Imagineering just because I've been there so damn long. I've been with Disney for 40 years, and yeah, yeah, I'm only 39, how about that. And so you talk about magic and uniqueness, and I think back to how Imagineering got formed. I mean, you think about Walt Disney, you know, Disney first and foremost considered himself a storyteller. But hand in hand with that storytelling was creating new ways of telling those stories. I mean, this dates all the way back to 1928 with Steamboat Willie, which was the very first synchronized sound cartoon. 1937, Snow White and the Seven Doors, which was the very first animated feature length film. So when it came time to do Disneyland, he was again doing something different, something radically different. A lot of people called it Walt's Folly, and the reason they called it Walt's Folly was because they thought that it was just going to be... just this spectacular failure and no one was going to come to this place. So it's in this spirit that the Walt Disney Company and Walt Disney Imagineering particular continues to exist. Is it not only are we continuing to tell stories in magical ways, but we're also looking to tell them in unique ways. And one of the unique ways we do that is through, you know, changes in technology, changes in philosophy, changes in the way people experience the things that we do. So I think we're going to spend a little time talking about that today, but that's sort of, again, the historical perspective. Yeah, and honestly, when we were hearing that kind of credo of the media lab and just in kind of taking in the ethos of what it is that everyone here does, I just felt so much resonance and I feel so much similarity between my work as an Imagineer and what I see going on here. There's so much joy in living in that area between art and science, between engineering and imagination. And each one of those kind of credos in the way that Dave was just talking about kind of enter in both into the experiences that we create, but also our kind of methodology of creating them. So I feel a lot of kindred souls out there. And to pick up on Sarah's talking about when we see something on YouTube or we come to the MIT Media Labs and we see stuff, the gears start like, oh, what can we, because you guys are doing the same thing. You're trying to figure out practical applications for the things that you do, things to make the world better, things to help us in what we do. We're doing the same thing, well maybe not make the world better. Happiness makes the world go round though. So we're thinking about ways that we can take some of these brilliant ideas and turn them into the stories that we tell in our theme parks. And I would say a lot of Media Lab students are storytellers because we meet with lots of different people and other students and other companies and we need to be able to explain our technologies in ways that these people can imagine them being in their lives. So I'm curious how each of you approach storytelling, especially being from such different departments and how you integrate technology into your stories. Sure. Well I guess I have a similar coming from advanced development and research and development have a similar task of figuring out what the story and what the experience is that technologies enable. So I feel like technology is, it's another tool, it's a paintbrush, it's another piece to build an experience with. And a lot of the work that we do is figuring out, well here's a new cool thing, what is it good for? What could it be good for? And experimenting and then figuring out how to convey that to people like Amy and Dave who are ultimately going to take those and bring them to the field, bring them to the guests. For me, I specialize in large format ride films and so when we get a story from our writers, oftentimes we are charged with learning how to express those using different forms of technology and often that is how we approach storytelling from an experiential standpoint because we're really going to move you literally and figuratively with these large rides. And while we call them attractions, which is the integration of all of the movement and the film and the sound and all the other aspects of effects that we use, oftentimes that expression is the story. The guests experiencing it is how we deal with story. So it's really quite interesting. It's amazing because as Emily said, storytelling is a part of all of our lives. We begin telling stories even before we can speak. For me, certainly I was very interested in writing when I was growing up but when I was in college I went to the University of Southern California, little school out in L.A. And I majored in English and journalism and I really thought that I was going to be a journalist. This was the time of Woodward and Bernstein. People were breaking these fabulous stories about Watergate and things of this sort. But at the same time, I grew up near Disneyland and as a senior in high school, I got a job at Disneyland as a sweeper. You know, the guys who go through the park and they sweep up the popcorn and everything that our guests drop and keep the park really clean. And it was fabulous because going to the University of Southern California, it was very close by. So I was able to live at school and work at Disneyland on the weekends to pay my way through school. And when it came time to graduate, two things happened. One is that as I was joking with them earlier, I got the opportunity. This was way back in 1983. I got the opportunity to go to Japan. We were just opening Tokyo Disneyland and I got to teach the Japanese how to sweep. Don't argue, you know, there was a lot more to it than that but it sounds kind of cool, right? You teach them how to sweep because they don't know how to sweep. And at the same time, I had graduated and now, you know, when I came back from Tokyo, I'm ready to move on. I'm not going to be a sweeper anymore. And so I started, you know, as many of you have done, will be doing, looking for a job. I was interviewing with newspapers. An opening came up in marketing at Disneyland as a marketing copywriter. And I ended up taking that job and it took me in an unexpected direction in my career. Not only writing as marketing but also the fact that three years later on the recommendation of my boss at that time, he said, you know what? You're doing much more for marketing than we deserve. You belong at Imagineering, which, you know, I was like, thank you for saying that. And I found myself at Imagineering. I've been there for about 30 years and during that time, I really got a chance to explore storytelling, not only practically creating the attractions, the shops, the restaurants that I hope all of you enjoy when you go to the parks, but also studying storytelling itself. I mean, internally, we do mentoring programs. I host an entire program on storytelling where I tell Imagineers, no matter where they come from, engineering, architecture, about storytelling. And like everyone else in the world, I also have a podcast. It's called Story Builders. Unfortunately, you need to be an Imagineer to listen to it. But we talk about story and it's interesting because usually I'm on your side of the microphone, so to speak. I'm doing the interviewing, so it's kind of strange to be on this side. You'll have to let me know how I did after. So I may end up asking you questions, Emily. So anyway, I hope that sheds a little light on story. Cool. Well, so earlier, Amy was mentioning that Imagineering is a state of mind. And I think that storytelling is really about creating these emotional connections. So how do you adapt stories to suit such a wide range of audiences, from children to adults, different genders, different cultures? How do you approach that? How do you make emotion accessible to everybody? Well, I guess since I'm the center of story, I guess so to speak, I can kind of start to tackle that and then you guys can jump in. You know, everything we do at Disney is based in story, whether it's motion pictures or it's television shows or even our parks. We may not literally tell you a narrative story when you get on something like Pirates of the Caribbean or the Haunted Mansion, but it's based in story. It comes out of story. And many of the characters and stories we bring to life are stories that were brought to us by Disney animation, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, all the wonderful intellectual property companies that Disney owns. So the idea for us is to take those stories and to turn them into something that you're not just looking at, but something that you're experiencing. And hopefully you're experiencing it on a more and more personal level, which I guess you can speak to. Sure, yeah. So I think one of the amazing things, we're such narrative creatures. We're constantly telling ourselves stories. You're constructing, every day you're going throughout your day, constructing this narrative of your life. And the same thing happens. I think about what we do as constructing kind of the tools for you to tell yourself that story of we're giving you, we're giving you environments, we're giving you characters, we're giving you perhaps a way to move through that, but really you, the guest, are the storyteller in that. You're actually putting all of those things together. When you're going through, say, the Haunted Mansion, what you particularly notice becomes your story of that attraction. And so each person gets their, in that way, gets their own individual experience. And then as we've been kind of pushing forward and exploring more new frontiers and new varieties of ways to bring those stories to life, there's some more opportunities to make those more personal and more responsive and interactive. And a lot of my work focuses on those. Not to take your job, Emily, but funny you should mention the Haunted Mansion, right? Yeah. In terms of a project like that. Sure. Let's see. Let's see how we do here. Can you bring up the ghost post? Thank you. So thank you. So in trying to figure out, so the Haunted Mansion is, it's turning 50 next year. This is an attraction that has been around for generations at this point and has reached guests in all sorts of different ways. And so going to that... Survived Eddie Murphy. You didn't see the movie? Aw. So it's been through many generations of both Imagineers and also of guests who have fallen in love with it. And it has a really deep group of fans out there who the six minutes worth that they spend on the attraction just could never be enough. They're looking for, how do I live Haunted Mansion? And you see just some amazing guest creations of the rooms of their houses are given over to Haunted Mansion. And there is a lot of passion and love for this story and this place that Imagineers brought to life over half a century ago. And so going into this with a lot of respect for Imagineers before us, we said, well, how do we offer those guests who really want to spend more time with that and actually be a part of that world? How do we offer them that opportunity? And so we put together this project. We consider this as a live prototype that we put out into the world. It was a limited run. We called it the Ghost Post. And what it was a few years ago, we basically made an offer to 999 foolish mortals who wanted to be part of the world of the ghosts to actually help the ghosts out with a very grim problem that they were having. And they could receive these boxes at home and these boxes were filled with artifacts. We can go to the next slide. We're filled with artifacts from the attic, from the mansion. And so really putting pieces of the mansion in our guest hands and going beyond that and in the 50 years since the mansion opened its gates, we now have these personal computers in our pockets, our smartphones. And so leveraging that as a way to have all of these objects interact and have them interact with our guest devices so that they could bring a little... those ghosts could actually come to visit them at their houses. And then as they're playing along, as all of these objects are interacting with each other or interacting with their phone, they're tuning in through their phantom radios, they're able to help the ghosts out with their dire problem. And then any time that they're coming to visit the park, their experience of the haunted mansion actually changes. So we're able to change the audio on board the attraction so that it would dynamically change just suit what our guests had been up to at home. So they're building a relationship with the ghosts as they're playing along at home, as they're helping the ghosts out with their problems. So they're not just any old visitor to the mansion. They have a special relationship with the ghosts and so the ghosts address them in that manner. And so as this unfolded over the course of three months, they could come back as many times as they wished and that story would evolve in the park as well as at home. Very cool. Individualized. Yes. I think that's the idea because that's one of the challenges we have as Imagineers as well, is that when we're creating our parks, we want to make very personal interactive experiences, but at the same time, we need to get 2,000 of you an hour through our particular attraction because if we don't, we're going to have some very dissatisfied guests on our hands. So we're just constantly trying to think up and leverage new ways to bring a little bit more of this personal interactive nature to these things and this is one of those ideas that we've been working on as well as many others. Speaking to personalization and interactivity, how do you constrain that narrative experience so that everybody still has the high quality Disney standard of storytelling even though they have control of where the story is going? You're way ahead of us. What, are you looking for a job? Boy, that is sort of like the million dollar question now. We're talking about personalized experiences or individual experiences and I don't, you know, interactive or real-time responsiveness in the attractions. Excuse me, I think that is where we're starting to go and if anybody has been on Flight of Passage, which is at the new Pandora World of Avatar, there are lots of different interactive or real-time or responsive effects in the whole land. The whole land is sort of on what we call an interconnect and we have control of all of these aspects that sort of respond to you or talk to you or respond to the time of day or if when you get on the Flight of Passage ride, there's a piece of technology that acknowledges you. The seat turns on and there's a camera and you can see yourself. So everything that sort of makes it so that you're having this in a very big communal experience, the individualized experience as well and I think that it's not necessarily like the evolution of using technology to further the creative immersion into these attractions. I think that that's where we're going and what's important to us, that the attractions actually, you have a relationship with them and so as you get on your Banshee, using all of that sort of personalized technology to have you feel like you're in control of it and so what is it to fly? I think that that's for me and in this iteration of the use of that technology and as we find more and more ways to use it, I think that's really special for us too. I think we're starting with a good base because really just visiting a Disney park is a personal experience. John Henshaw, Disney legend, once said that Disneyland was the very first form of virtual reality because if you think about it, if you're going to a movie or you're watching a television show, I mean, you're looking at a screen, the director is telling you where to look, right? Wherever he points the camera, that's where you look but when you come to our parks, you're actually walking into the movie, so to speak and so you're building your own story, you're your own director slash cinematographer and I think that already gives you a personal experience above and beyond what you've had before and I think our next step is, as Amy said, is to take our individual attractions and try and push those boundaries, push those margins so that you get an experience that's drastically or maybe not drastically, but different from the person who may be in the car behind you or maybe even sitting next to you. The guest is the protagonist in the story. We're building a world and you guys are navigating. You're creating your own plot. We don't use plot like our traditional linear storytelling. You're creating your own plots and depending on the park and depending on the experiences or the land that you're going to you're creating your own experience, your own plot throughout the land and so I think that that in and of itself it's not just like you're distant. We're composing as if it were a sort of a screen like we have wide shots and we have medium shots and we have cross dissolves between our lands and so we use a lot of the same vocabulary that traditional media or traditional filmmakers will use but again you can look wherever you want and so you're creating your own adventure inside of our parks. And in terms of taking a story, I hope all of you are familiar with Pirates of the Caribbean which is an attraction that opened in 1967 at Disneyland. It's considered one of the classics and when you think about that there's no narrative storytelling going on there. You're taking a journey in three acts so I mean there are still some story structures you know the first act you're going through a bayou very quiet then you go down a waterfall into caverns where you see these skeletons act two and then finally act three is the pirates coming to life and pillaging and looting a town. So we do have we do have story structure. We're just not telling narrative stories often in the context of these rides and attractions that we're creating. Maybe to evolve on that because one of the things that I've found interesting is the relative newcomer to Imagineering compared to my colleagues on stage here. One of the things I've been fascinated by is the evolution of how we think about our guest's role in the story. So you look at and how our attractions and experiences have evolved as that has happened. So you look at one of the opening day attractions of Disneyland was snow white scary adventures and in the original there was no snow white. There was no you went into there was a big big sign over the this big stone snow white snow white scary and there was no snow white. And early guests were you might understand a little bit confused by looking for where it said snow on the label on the tin said snow white scary adventures where is no white and the intention of the Imagineers was that you were snow white. You were the person who was being offered the apple by the witch. And so this is you know maybe didn't come across was a little bit confusing. We're still getting our sea legs under us of I'm trying to get back to pirates of how how to how to do this but the desire was there from the start of how do we give our guests a role to play in the story apart. Not just make them not just make them sites years but actually make them participants. You also touch upon a good point is that you know we take these familiar stories and we put them into our parks. What do we do with them in that particular case snow white scary adventures has. Let's let's just say there isn't a long wait for the attraction and we actually put snow white in the attraction when we redid it way back in nineteen eighty three we completely redid fantasy land at tomorrow fantasy land at Disneyland and we put her in but essentially what this attraction is is what we call internally a book report. It's basically just telling you what the movie was which is very difficult to do on attraction and besides you know you're not giving me anything different that I didn't already see by watching the original snow white and the seven dwarfs and it led to some funny problems with this attraction you're going through it you meet the seven dwarfs you meet the witch who offers the apple to snow white and the very last scene is the hag she's up on top of some rocks and she's trying to price some rocks loose to go down on you and the dwarfs and we ran out of room in the attraction so then you came out and it said and they lived happily ever after so I think one of the things we try and do as imagineers is to somehow bring something new something fresh to these stories and it's nothing new I mean Walt did it back in nineteen fifty fifty five with Mr. Toad's Wild Ride which has always been one of our most popular attractions you get in this little vehicle and you carene through the through the countryside and through toad hall and it has a truly unique Disney ending because it's the only attraction where you end up in hell sorry spoiler alert it's for the kids it's for the kids but what what the imagineers did is that they didn't try and retell the story of Mr. Toad they took an element of the story which was Mr. Toad wanting a car and they turned that into an attraction using his personality because he's wild and he's crazy and what would Mr. Toad be like in a car and so that was I think a very successful way of taking an existing intellectual property and enhancing it in our parks in a new and different way and so you mentioned you mentioned pirates earlier and that's an attraction that's had some some a lot of evolution both in the original and trouble aren't you I I'm I'm trying to I'm trying I'm trying to queue we actually have media do we do we're doing the conversation yeah are you okay so Amy was actually very integral in creating a totally revamped and innovative version of Pirates of the Caribbean for Shanghai and we're hoping that she could share some of her lessons from that we want me to set it up first with the old one yeah please so Pirates of the Caribbean as I said open in 1967 and then in 2001 2002 our studio released a movie called Pirates of the Caribbean Curse of the Black Pearl very very successful movie Johnny Depp is Captain Jack Sparrow and so naturally now people didn't necessarily associate Pirates of the Caribbean with our attraction they were associating it with the movie especially since there were going to be more movies coming out so while filming was going on for Pirates of the Caribbean to dead man's chest we made the decision let's put some Disney characters into the let's let's put some of these new Pirates characters in the attraction so we put Captain Jack Sparrow and we put Captain Barbosa but this was sort of a band-aid this was just introducing these characters but now with Shanghai Disneyland we had an opportunity to completely rethink pirates yeah we did and we wanted to take you on the journey as Jack Sparrow has hidden his gold and we are on this adventure and he's he's he is protecting it from David Jones and he has to go on this adventure under the sea and so we have this very we have a huge attraction which is very technologically advanced but we're still going on a journey and we're going to take you on a journey to to find the treasure and then we're going to battle it's called the battle for the sunken treasure and it it is a huge like in a footprint it is a very big attraction so we're able to use a lot of projection technologies a lot of huge sets a lot of a lot of advanced animatronics to tell this story and you actually go underwater we actually take a dive underwater and there are people who have come our guests who have come and wanted to know if we were actually going underwater they'd look and try to find all the places that we dug down into actually going to these to this very amazing journey because these domes are 100 foot wide and 75 feet tall and and and you are absolutely immersed in these giant battles with all these effects and and it's it's really immersive and it is an emotional experience for people to actually be transported down into the water and and and mesmerized by these huge sets and huge and if we could have built everything we would have but the mixed media of it is actually part of the the illusion the creation of illusion of journey of this journey underwater and you can see how how how big these these domes are and I wish we had had an actual video to show you but I don't think we do but they are we worked with our partners at ILM part of the Disney family to create these amazing scenes and I you know like if you want to ask about what it is that you want to share about it because it is there's so much to share about yeah I think something that everybody here would be interested in is how do you merge existing work flows and processes with the unknowns of exploring new technologies like how do you approach that when you're building an attraction that's as innovative as this one so everything you see in our attractions there's a lot of traditional film at least in my world of of of ride films there's a lot of very very old a hundred year old methodologies that we use and really you know our job is to make the technology disappear so you feel like you're in these worlds and so using technology to empower the creative process make it shorter so that you can get more out of the time that you're spending on the attraction so we own you know even though you know you're you're convincing you know are the people who are stakeholders to invest a great deal of time and energy and which translates to money into these attractions so you want to get as much refinement as possible and the technology really empowers us to learn more about our attractions earlier on so we'll build them in what we would traditionally called and I can't believe they're saying traditional VR and so we're using some of these immersive technologies that we're using in our design process you know if we could have done this in real time we would have so we program in real time we use these real-time tools to empower the iterative process so that we can explore what it is that how we tell the story where I put your eyes how do I make the illusion of moving and diving down so in order for me to learn this you actually we're either in a headset or on what we'll call a holodeck to understand the attraction earlier in a digital version and then we use these the large attractions as they're building remember you know we take these parts and pieces we design these things on traditionally like on pieces of paper with paintings and as targets for us to hit and then we have to figure out how to dimensionalize them and so we do this really early in our process and then we go away and three years four years it takes to actually realize these huge buildings and so then traditionally we'd come back and go okay so this is where we are we start from scratch to say okay let's start to program this from scratch and now we can actually start really early in our process using your like what you guys would use as as as you know the software that you guys know like Maya and we'll work with all of this sort of technology up front to design in real time or in the digital world and we use the attraction to verify that what we've we've imagined and what we've built actually works that remember we're moving you literally and figuratively through these environments and in order for us to know if they're in sync that they work together that the emotional impact that we're trying to take you on you know journey through actually is working so technology really just empowers our design process and our iterative process and then obviously the display the display is we use a lot of technology in the display and I would say just as a I didn't work on this project so I get to gush about it is is just the blend between in the and it's really it's a testament to how successful that merge process is and using those digital pre-visualization tools to be able to understand something they're making something at this epic scale these how tall are the they're like 75 feet tall well there it is it is a scale that is is you know architectural beyond architectural and combining that with equally epic size media and the understanding how those elements interlace just wouldn't be possible without these it wouldn't be possible to end up on opening day as successful as it is without these pre-visualization tools without the you know being able to ride it together before it exists and I think that's the uniqueness of sort of the Disney difference the ability to use all these tools glue them all together the infrastructure like if you think about all the inputs that you know that we control all of the photons we control all of the and I'll call them eartons because you know eartons photons the control of the rides all the ride tons all of that data they're really the you know sort of like there's so much data that we're controlling it's not that the complexity of that in and of itself you know there's the static asset set of the building and all of the sets and how those things go together those are different groups there are a hundred and forty something disciplines that make up making a theme park so even just as a communication tool as a team building tool all of these things helped us collaborate what is group collaboration and how do you use the tool sets to collaborate communicate and I think that that's really like to make these are communal experiences and that is something about you know sort of the their social and heads up and you really want you know that's where we're using our technology I think is is illusion design so another question for Amy and Sarah I'm curious to know how you take something from R&D that's been prototyped and demoed to maybe a couple tens or hundreds of people and then robustly proof it to be put into the parks because I know Amy has championed a couple of projects to move from this R&D space into a space where guests get to enjoy them sure so we'll take two examples at massively different scales that have transitioned from out of the out of the out of the lab and into the world under under Amy's under Amy's care and so the first one if we can go to the Navi Shaman these so the first one is this is this is this figure this she is represents a step forward imagineering has been making what we call audio animatronics since the very early days since Walt got fascinated with do you want me to step in please, please step in I'm only yeah so audio animatronics dates back to 1963 with an attraction called the Enchanted Tiki Room the name like the name imagineering which is a combination of imagination and engineering the name comes from animation and electronics the audio portion comes from its early operating system which was actually tape so imagine you know for any of you who remember eight track tape I believe that Abraham Lincoln was a 12 track show and and Enchanted Tiki Room was a 24 track show I believe so anyway these early versions were called A1 figures they were very limited in movement in the 1980s we went to A100 figures which incorporated compliance technology in order to make them in order to allow them to move much freer but at that time they were also just pneumatics and hydraulics and that sort of picks up the story now with are we calling this an A1000 figure is that A1 million I don't think she's the shaman of songs yes he's the shaman of songs there you go it's story not technology absolutely she's her individual and as we're looking at this evolution this you know Walt was fascinated with this being able to capture something that felt alive this liveliness and we wanted a consistent performance for all of our guests so in going after this figure we're we're sitting in our D and going okay well the this film this film by James Cameron just places a massive gauntlet and when it came out if you remember just the incredible emotion that he was able to get through the through that motion capture process be able to bring these bring these this world but also the creatures that inhabit it to life in a way that really I mean I remember going to the theater and going I've been transported and so as as we're as we're thinking about how do we make this a place that you can actually visit and the how do we do how do we bring these Navi to life they're enormous and they're incredibly expressive and emotive and how do we do that justice and so actually going back to the very same techniques that the filmmakers use to be able to do motion capture to be able to capture that the humanity of that performance and create a animatronic figure that can that that can actually perform in an equal way and I I we don't have any video I mean I encourage you all to go look at video or just visit her in person she's in Florida on Pandora in Florida and because the expressiveness of her face alone is astonishing and as you guys I don't know is there a show of hands how many people have been to Disney's Animal Kingdom nice okay so animals are too Animal Kingdom like magic is to Magic Kingdom right so everything starts with the animals so when we make story or when we make parks we talk about the themes of the park and so for for Disney's Animal Kingdom it is about animals so it is the sanctity of nature that nature is immutable that everything starts there she always wins and then of course the transformation through adventure and so you're gonna go on your own adventure and you will have done this you'll go see the world through new eyes you're going to a place called Africa you're going to a place called Asia and you're going to a place called Pandora so how does Pandora fit into this really you know sort of that IP and also you know sort of like okay so how do you how do you how do you fit it in and so we start with like themes so the immutable immutability of nature transformation through adventure and then when we get there so the call to action so we talk about you know protecting indigenous folks we talk about protecting animals so everything that we did in Pandora goes through the same filters so that it fits naturally in animal kingdom and so part of you know our audience that were Avatar fans told us that they wanted to you know the things that they wanted to do were meet a Navi go to a bioluminescent forest or a banshee and so things that you're like that's a really it's a tall order yes exactly that is going to be really hard but if you go back to the basics and part of you know going to see a Navi and the shaman of songs there's a whole sort of the Navi culture what is that to immerse our you know our fans our guests into that culture so those themes are rampant everything in Pandora runs through the same thematic work that we worked on um for Disney's Animal Kingdom so I think that that's a really good place to start well and maybe even talk a little bit about where the story of Pandora takes place in the timeline of the Avatar films right so I think that's really interesting yeah so you know again Disney's Animal Kingdom we're introducing you to the world and we're hoping that going to these to Africa and going to see the animals of Africa and going to meet you know it started out it thematically as a Swahili first park so if you'd address someone in Swahili they would speak back to you in Swahili so you know you want definitely cultural you know authenticity and so when you go to Pandora it can't be just about Jake and Deteri it has to be about Pandora so that you can bring your own story to Pandora so the the land takes place way beyond the conflict way beyond like this is now sort of a clean the RDA that you know to clean up from this the polluters that were there and so we separated it completely from the movies so that other stories could happen on and Pandora and that also other stories are going to happen on Pandora like we knew that the world would extend we you know we knew that there would be sequels and so we wanted the world to be evergreen and ever fresh and so that different stories could happen on Pandora much like different stories so yeah and so I feel like it might be easier to make something feel evergreen or like it can stand the test of time a little bit more when we're dealing with places but how do you approach making an intellectual property evergreen when it's about the characters right so like Star Wars or Marvel for example it's so much about I mean I would I would actually say Star Wars is about the world it's I mean yes there are many there are many in that world you may feel an emotional connection to but it's it's the world as much as as any other as any other piece of it and that's really in thinking about how to bring that to our to bring that to our parks we're we're building a planet you've never seen before but it but it feels familiar because it's that world that you have fallen in love with and so the it has have iconic have iconic characters have a you've seen you've seen varying versions of the smuggler archetype before you've seen varying versions of somebody going on that hero's journey and that happens throughout this world so it's about visiting the world rather than about visiting the character I think there's I think there's some great examples where it is where the characters are in the world on the world side you can also expand your definition of character I mean we just show the Millennium Falcon which for a lot of people that is a character and to Amy when we were scoping out Pandora World of Avatar it was like okay our themes and also our sort of must-haves what would people want to do here we went through the same exercises on Star Wars Galaxy's Edge and of course one of the top things there was Millennium Falcon and we're going to take it one step further we're going to actually allow you to pilot the Millennium Falcon so you know that's and to and again to Sarah's point again not necessarily retelling the stories from the movies but building this world this new world which is the great thing about Star Wars building this new world that's going to have a whole bunch of new stories that our guests are actually going to be able to personally experience is really the goal yeah I think it's really interesting this transition to where guests are becoming characters in the universe as well as being visitors to the park do you guys think that that is a cool evolution and is how are you expanding on that or how do you explore that as maybe Dave you as a story writer how do you try to create these moments for guests to be characters we're giving them opportunities both formally and informally you know you look it's not something for instance you can be a Jedi right now in any of our parks you can become a princess at Bibi Bibi Bibi Boutique so there are these opportunities to take an active role immediately but I think Star Wars is going to take it to to another level in terms of actually making guests feel like they're part of that landscape part of what's happening there I think more than we've done in the past yes and then you have the Marvel Universe and so that becomes a little bit different when it comes to that is a character based universe yeah it's hard to it's hard to build that world I mean what do we got we got Asgard well Asgard doesn't exist anymore and a lot of that world looks like ours a lot of that world looks like ours it certainly does right so that there you go how do you know how can you tell it's an alien place like all of our design vocabulary but you know the connection to the world we talk about experience you guys you know our guests really want to be connected to it and actually connection at least in Pandora leads to these sort of wanting to do something for them with them and I think that you guys on galaxies edge are going to really like be participating in those worlds participating with each other remember this is a social sort of medium a communal medium and I think that you know what's different about that in games and then you're extending the medium in a very social and communal medium and I think that you guys are really pushing that the envelope as far as you know interacting with each other interacting and interacting with the world so speaking of interacting with the world sort of combining a lot of these things interactivity characters and storytelling can you talk a little bit about your robotic characters that maybe can feed off of emotional resonance of your guests why sure so this is another project that started as started as just a little bit of wild R&D brainstorming and well what if and if you can go to the mission breakout and ended up actually getting into a corporate into another thing that Amy worked on and really this project started with this concept of not the building but this is where they live this is where they ended up living but before that they were in the lab and it was really about how do we have we have so many we have so many characters that are just performers that don't that we'll try and make eye contact but it's can you bring up the tiny life slide the bird like picture space bird chicken little biloos yes little bird thingies the fluff there you go there we are perfect so they live in that big that big house they've been collected by the collector but before that they were this idea of how can we make our animatronics or audio animatronics how can we make them responsive and alive and really continue to go after this this living quality and part of what we said at R&D was well it's not just part of being alive is is reacting to the world around you is being present and so giving our little biloos some a little bit more a little bit more sensitivity to the world so that they can respond so that as their as guests are walking by them they they're in the in the queue area as you're going through the collector's collection and so as we're playing with them they're they're as you're walking by them they do actually make eye contact they do actually react to you and we actually as R&D really want to give our really want to give the creators of our attractions and the the widest possible pallet of tools and so looking at the emotion of these characters and how that's portrayed so they can actually be dialed in so you can have one that's a little shy you can have one that's a little bit more aggressive and kind of bomb bombastic and give that to our creative directors give that to our designers to be able to dial those personalities in so it's really you know this is actually a really sort of good tale of how something will go from things that are in complete development and how we have like you guys have open houses and so what we did was the audience of the galaxy mission breakout which is obviously you can see the tower it's about the collector which is from the films has this collection this fortress where he collects things and they're held hostage or collected and we were going through open house that year with Kevin Feige the person who is the producer from all of the Marvel cinematic universe and we looked at the there it is the tower or the fortress and we were like what are those those are cool and there are these we actually spent like an hour talking right an hour talking to these creatures and these little creatures are responding to us and we're like so very quickly realized that we could put them in the movie and that we could put them in our attraction and so actually it was a relationship between both from an R&D perspective from an actual practical making of things that work in an attraction and then also informing the cinematic universe so the dimensional universe and the cinematic universe starting to have a dialogue with each other so that extending the world building that we're doing just based on the Marvel universe and so now you can go to actually while you're standing in line you can actually interact with them and if you're really loud and boisterous they're really like loud and boisterous listening to you and if they're and if you're sort of like really quiet they're sort of like just in resting and so you know it really becomes something that the dialogue between development and implementation and then also sort of emotive it was a great sort of example of how this happens and organically too which was awesome absolutely and I'd say from the from the R&D side it's actually it's also a great story of starting from an experience first of going well we make we just made we had all at R&D lived with that shaman figure for years and you know we made some made some large of things and thinking about okay if we go after something that's small and expressive and what does it mean to be small and expressive and just how small and how minimal can we get in terms of giving it life and so this started out as colleagues Leslie Evans and Corey Rouse with a literal just a hacked together puppet a little felt how many ways does this need to move how many different expressions can we make out of a relatively small range of of motion and how can we create that connection and then forming and then using that to inform well what kind of sensors do we want what kind of what kind of motors do we want how do we want to make these come alive and literally give them the tools to grow into the dream I think it's also an evolution of again audio animatronics I mean these guys see their genesis back in a character that we created back in the early 2000s Lucky the dinosaur I don't know if any of you were able to see Lucky and the tremendous thing about Lucky was he was autonomous but he was autonomous in terms of his movement in terms of what he did we had complete control over that Lucky was the last remaining dinosaur Lucky and nobody even cared about the technology he pulled a cart and in the cart were his batteries his operating system and his operator but when you when you got together like you never thought of that you just thought about this wonderful personality that this dinosaur had and then from there we went into Muppet mobile lab based on the Muppets Dr. Bunsen the movie Wally so evolving up to this point where now those were all controlled so just a convergence of all of these things for your smaller scale running independently completely autonomous boom that's where we end up with this and so I don't know if we got the the Jake oh yes the next really we can talk about that he's been out he's been out to the parks I know he has the next the next the next generation so we so in thinking about how our our animatronics can our animatronics can and our characters can become unanchored and can totally autonomous we're we're headed to Westworld territory here aren't we so you guys are already working on this too right yeah so to give everybody in the audience a little bit of context Jake is a robot that we're the Disney is exploring to be able to put in front of the guests in a way where guests can walk right past them and not have it collide and cause any injuries but also have it be interactables that everybody can he's he's completely autonomous he is not being controlled by anyone he is just merely out in the area and so a lot of that work is really still on this very core of how do we express character and emotion through through movement and expression and how how do we do all those things of course safely and with all of the challenges that a theme park environment presents and people are unpredictable and crowds and all of those things and allow that character to roam safely and interact with our guests so giving us again continue to increase the pallet of tools that we have he's he's roving around he's had a few hours out in he's as R&D we we do a lot of things inside of the lab but because so much of our work is about is about people and interacting and understanding how our guests interact with things if we leave it in the lab too long then we miss out on all of that and we don't understand the thing that we're building and so jake has been out on some amazing voyages in Tomorrow Land and and getting to see him interacting with and seeing how guests respond to them and then continuing to iterate on how we think about continuing to develop that so that it's ready for folks like Amy and Dave to take out to the field. As a lot of master's students are learning at the Media Lab evaluation is critical when you're making any new technology. Shout out to thesis prep. So I want to ask one more question, and then we're going to move on to the Q&A. So everybody remember that you can send in questions on Twitter using the hashtag MLTalks or go to Slido and enter the code X052 to ask your questions. So my final question to you all is, for better or for worse, people have a relationship at this point with their phones. It's something that they have in their personal lives that they bring with them to the parks. Do you think that that is a distraction or an enhancement? And how do you as storytellers either draw them away from their screens or integrate screens into the experience? Sure. Well, first of all, it's a reality. Yeah. So we have to deal with it. Yes. It is part of our guest's lives as much as anything else. So acknowledging it, I think, is the first thing to do. But I think as we have more and more successes with some of our handheld devices, our mobile devices, and releasing things on them, I think that we often in our theme park environment or in the parks environment talk about heads down behavior and heads up behavior. And it really is about when it's appropriate to have hands down behavior and heads up behavior. And remember, this is you're with your families. We want you to be with your families. We're really into that communal experience. And so you don't want it to be antisocial. So really just knowing physiologically how you use it, when you use it, when it's appropriate to use it, and acknowledging that it exists. And it's a really big part of our lives. And that it's also a designable surface. So, and this is something that's a little new for us as Imagineers who are used to controlling the whole world, literally building it from the ground up, that this is a device that our guests are bringing in, that they're bringing their own lives along with it. They're maybe streaming something that is not a Disney thing. And what's going on here is we finally said, well, you know, that's a designable surface too. We don't have to ignore it or be scared of it. We can actually use this to create and enhance your experience of the park. And so we put out Disney, Play Disney Parks, which is all downloaded and take it on your next adventure to the park. And it basically brings another, it brings a little bit of the park to your, to your personal device so that you can, instead of being heads down, actually gives you a new way to interface with the environment. We're being able to build in some, a little special effects, some magic that the phone can interact with, but also really encouraging you to interact with each other. And so our parks are really about having an experience with your family, with your friends that you're there with and using this to enhance that. And I think that's a key point, that we do have this Disney Parks Play app where you would be looking down at your phone, but even in its interface, we're encouraging you to play the games with your family, with your friends, in fact, you can't play the games without them. So even in this, even with your phone, we're encouraging you to not solo yourself or silo yourself in the line, but to actually communicate with the people near you. So even then, we're trying our best. And it enhances, I think, also the experience of navigation, you know, how to get to eating, how to get to, it's not, you know, the practical aspects, like you use your phone for anyway, like getting a car, or getting transportation, or getting, like knowing when things start. So it really is sort of making reservations at the blue volume. Absolutely, how to, you know, how to enhance your and make it easier for families to navigate the park and make plans with each other. So I think that too. And also like to check your memories, collecting your memories, you know, which are these sort of, they grow in value, they're an investment for you. They, you know, they're an intangible, but we're giving you a way to make sure that they're, you know, that they're saved and collectible and that you can share them when you're at home and with each other. Great, well, so now at this point, we're gonna shift gears a little bit and we're gonna move on to the Q&A section of the talk. We've got people sending in questions online. Remember, use the hashtag MLTalks on Twitter or go to slide O to ask your questions. So the first question I think we wanna look at, somebody had asked before, I just wanna answer it just that everybody knows. Somebody asked what was the relationship with Disney and MIT and, you know, we're happy to share that Disney has recently become a member of the MIT Media Labs member community and that means that hopefully this is the start of a very awesome partnership where students can learn from Imagineers and in turn Imagineers can learn from our students. And so now we're gonna open up the questions to our panelists and let's start with from Anonymous. What do you think is the most important, interesting or impactful new technology that you've seen introduced at the park since you started at Disney? Oh my goodness. Oh, don't toss it to me, I was hoping that it would be. Again, what I'd love to just reiterate about technology is that, you know, there is, if you went and knew, if you knew how much technology is actually in all of these attractions, obviously we're using a lot of technology and newness and being able to use it and sort of the little de-democratization of it, the accessibility of it. It really is just about using a lot. There's so much available to us as makers and that is way more accessible. And so using a lot of technology, there is technology everywhere, but we don't wanna put that between you and the experiences that you're having, right? But we're using it to empower the guests to have just a more individualized experience or a more connected experience, a more engaged experience. How do we engage you? But also just to make the attractions do more. And so there's so much technology in there and we really, we don't like to acknowledge it only insofar as at some point it's really all the glue together to make the experience. And so you guys, that's where we wanna talk about technology, I think. We've done our jobs right, it fades away. Right. Or it feels like magic. Right. And the technology that helps us tell our stories is also helping us, they're giving us tools that help us do our jobs even better. We mentioned the digital immersive showroom a little bit earlier on. And I mean one of the impactful things there is if any of you have been on Radiator Springs Racers, which is part of Cars Land at Disney California Adventure all the way out in California, of course. This attraction opened in 2012. We actually started riding, so to speak, this attraction in 2008. And when we started riding it, we were actually able to make some substantive changes to this experience during its development. Like adding at the end, adding in one more dip through a cavern that wasn't there before. So tools like this are enabling us to figure things out way before we build them because obviously, you know, we wanna make the best possible attraction that we can and it's a lot easier and cheaper to change it in the design phase than it is to change it in the construction phase. And also, has anybody been to Gardens of the Galaxy Mission Breakout? Anyone? All right, so there's a Halloween show as well called Monsters After Dark. And that is a 30 minute changeover to a nighttime experience. A whole new show. And the reason we can do that is technology. But it literally, the experience becomes 180 degrees different. And so that's technology lets you do that. And that was empowering to us as creators to be able to change the whole feeling of a whole attraction by just pushing a button. So I think that that too, so that you guys have different experiences for the same, like you go during the day and you see one thing and you go at night it's a completely different experience. Okay, great, we're gonna take another question. So Catherine wants to know, can you talk about the tension between personalization and scalability and how do you see technology helping to change that in the future, expand on that in the future? Yeah, I think we touched on it a little bit earlier. Sure. Yeah, I mean, our business has to work at scale. We have many, many visitors to the parks every day. And so designing for that scale obviously is a requirement. For me it was a big mental shift. My previous company also made immersive experiences. It was a three-person company. We made immersive experiences for, for, you know, maybe several thousand at the most. And so the difference between those scales is enormous. And I think one of the pieces that's really something that I think about a lot is being able to, as designing interactions and design for interactivity in that personalization is how do I give choices that are clear? How do I make that interactivity accessible so that I can teach you and invite you to play in this quickest time possible? And so that's a, and it's a great design challenge because if you can do that, it's like it's the old Mark Twain thing, but for design, if you can, well, attributed to Mark Twain, you know, if I'd had more time, I would have made it shorter. If you're a really great designer, you can make it succinct and make that invitation and how do I interact and how do I play? And also the personalization aspect, you need to put it in context as well. As Amy said, you know, one of the reasons you come to our parks is for a communal experience with your family, with friends. So when we design something personal, like Toy Story Mania, where you're actually competing with your friends, I mean, you're competing with your friends, right? You're not, you know, you wanna get the high score, but you're also, there's a friendly thing going on, a friendly competition. So I don't think we ever want to eliminate the fact that the reason these parks exist in the first place was for adults and children to have fun together in an environment such as this. So it's this constant balancing act that I think we're doing in our parks. And I think at the heart of it, our parks are personal because they're visceral because you're there and you're there with your family, you're there with your friends, but that visceral quality is really, it's the special thing about getting to be an Imagineer of being able to have that, it feels personal because it is because I'm experiencing it. And whether or not, you know, it's not about sticking your name on a thing, or allowing you to, you know, that the feeling of it being there just for you. Cool, so we'll take another question. The questions have been rolling in, so thank you everybody for asking all these amazing questions. A really fun one that came through was what is the craziest or weirdest hack that you've done to prototype or proof something out? Oh, no. No, I mean, it's literally. He's just, you know, what is it to prototype a ride? What is it to understand a ride, you know, and that's like driving through parking. I mean, there are crazy things like driving through parking lots and swinging things around and, you know, and in safe ways. She's talking about the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, roller coaster down at the Magic Kingdom in Florida where we literally got on the back of a pickup, a flat-begged truck with the ride system and some guy drove us around. Just to see what a sweet evening would do. You know, so definitely, like there, you hack everything, like gaffer's tape, a lot of gaffer's tape, string. There are all crazy things. I mean, like you guys, I mean, I don't, like what else do you guys, there are a lot of crazy things going on here that you hack. I think there's some tradition that I might see about hacking and build and taking something that may look like a car that you put on top of a dome somewhere. And so they're like, this is a thing. There's a legendary story of Soren over California. Yes, that's a great example. Yeah, one of our engineers, he was trying, you know, Soren, in case you're not familiar with it, is an attraction in which you are, you're supposed to be on a hang glider flying over California and now around the world. And so we were working on this ride system and Mark Sumner, who was the head engineer for that, he was, you know, these guys are working on, you know, gee, they tried out using a dry cleaning system. They tried this and they tried that. And well, finally, he, over Thanksgiving one year, he went home to his parents' house for Thanksgiving dinner and he pulled his erector set out of the attic and he started fiddling with it. And by the end of that four-day weekend, he had assembled with his erector set what became the ride system for Soren over California. So, you know, that's a hack, right? I mean. Well, absolutely. And I mean, imagine you sit there and make connects versions of everything. Absolutely. I mean. I mean, I think at the heart of it is, we're challenged with this job of making things that don't exist. And so virtually everything starts as a hack is how do I, and how do I, you know, we know eventually we're gonna invest a bunch of money and do it the right way. How do I do it the quick way to understand what this thing is? Right, what does rapid prototyping of a really expensive ride system look like? Right. Often it looks like driving a random pickup truck. Right, exactly. So, like, you can absolutely imagine what that might look like. I mean, if you guys have someone said to you, you know, you have to make a flying Banshee, what do you imagine that prototype might have looked like before we could actually put a machine to it? You know, it was like, what is it like to fly? So see bottom line, we all share the same DNA. Right, the same DNA. That's why we're here. I mean, because we do share the same DNA. We were as interested in what you were doing as you are obviously in sort of like, we're doing that dialogue. We're really excited to be partners here because I remember because I think that that partnering, that like imagineers are everywhere. You all are imagineers. It's the way you think about things. And so we encourage all imagineering, you know, everywhere. So another great question that came through was how has your career in storytelling impacted the way that you tell stories about your personal lives? Just make it up all the time. That was terrible hacks that we're now trying at home, right, about swinging from a roof or something. But it affects the way you approach your life, I think, in storytelling and the narrative of your life or how you live your life and what your focus groups of one, I find myself really watching so many more people and how people use transportation, how they use anything, how they use anything, how they experience their spaces. We walk around here, how do you use your spaces? What does the public space mean? What does private space mean? What is collaboration? How do you get people to collaborate? How do you get introverts to collaborate? How do you get people who are super, you know, sort of like not used to articulating? So it affects everything in your life when you're constantly thinking how to watch how people are in the world, how they experience the world, so that you can bring that narrative back into sort of your work. And so a lot more observation I find for me definitely. For me it's been more of a practical application as I said from the start is that, you know, I've gotten this fascination with sort of the science, the emotion, the how we build stories and how we tell stories, you know, doing a podcast and doing an entire presentation to imagineers. I mean, I thought I was just gonna write stories and now I'm trying to help people mentor the next generation. This is how we do the stories. You know, and not to mention that, you know, like a lot of, I'm sure we have a, there was so many people out there who creative writing, I mean, I mean we're all trying to eventually write the great American novel, although I don't know what that's gonna look like in five years, so that could be the next hack. Oh, interesting. So somebody also asked, where do you guys see augmented reality fitting into the parks in the future? Well, I mean, I think in part, it's actually easy to see our parks as being augmented reality. Already. I completely agree. Taking people out of the medic and moving them into this fantastical universe. Right, so in that way, I think we've been thinking as creators of augmented reality for a long time, before there was XR VR, AR as a discipline, obviously, you know, Disney had its own part to play in the emergence of VR back in the day of Disney Quest and enormous CRTs counterbalanced on, counterbalanced with a big counterweight so that you could fly on Aladdin's magic carpet. Oh, even actually the Walt Disney Imagineering Lab at Innoventures. There you go. 1994. But we've been, we've been making, we've been making, we've been augmenting reality to transport you to different places for since Imagineering started. Yeah. So it's, and again, just a hark on it, to answer the heart of the question, the specificity of the question of, it's like everything, it's another tool, it's another technology, it's another paintbrush. I mean, some of you may be aware of, if you've been on the Disney cruise line, we have two ships, the Disney Dream and the Disney Fantasy, where we actually use augmented reality in the inside cabins, because obviously if you're an inside cabin, you have no view. But what if you put a porthole with a virtual view and you augment that with Disney characters, then hey, you got a new way to sell your inside cabins. And the ocean is suddenly a little more alive. And everyone's, yeah, exactly. There's a storm bruise and all of a sudden there's characters from Nemo at your window. You see the same thing happening throughout the ship of the midship detective agency and you're bringing the, where you're, or throughout the Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom where you're bringing, you're augmenting little places, little niches where you felt like, oh, that's just a wall, or that's just a painting. And now they're coming to life as you play, as you interact with it. So it seems like all of you wear at least a couple of different hats. How do you balance both technical expertise and creative passions in the day-to-day at Imagineering? It all comes, I mean, I personally, my job is about creative expression. I just happen to use all these different technological tools to help bring all of that together. So they're so connected, storytelling, but again, we're creative people first and foremost, I think. Even if you're a technologist, you're being asked to hack or bend your mind in some way that some sort of like interpretive dance storyteller is trying to tell you what to do in there. You know, when we made Flight of Passage, we have, you know, Joe Roddy is a very expressive person and he wanted to, the last sort of the third act of it is a ballet and he kept trying to explain the ride profile of what he was doing by doing this interpretive dance of this ballet of the banshees. And so we're like, we're gonna go down to Lights from Entertainment, we're gonna put you in a motion capture volume and we are going to capture your interpretive dance so that the most direct way is to give a director the tools to express and have that become our first ride profile. So that we really were like the sort of it's really meta, but it sort of like make you, technology helps us to separate the different parts of this creative process into very focused sort of tasks. And then you sew them back together, but it really helps this direct expression of a creative person. And that's, it is really like, what is the fewest amount of words that this person has to use in order to express themselves? And technology really helps that. And I would say as a creative director within Imagineering R&D, my role is doing both and actually going both directions. So as often we start with that emotional place and we have an experience that we wanna create, we have this ghost post that we wanna allow the ghost to communicate and then we go out and look for, well, what are all, we have these computers in our pockets. What are all of the ways that we can use and abuse those sensors and all of that computing power to create the experience of the ghost coming to you and visiting you at your home? And how can we do that? And so that involved both going out there and asking that question and venting some new things. And two, it works the other direction of well, we have this really cool thing. I don't know quite what to do with it. And so I work with so many talented technologists, artificial intelligence experts, roboticists and thinking about who we're constantly thinking about what's the new technology. And I get the amazing job to say, well, what experiences could we make out of that and inviting folks in from the larger group of Imagineering to help us think about that and figure out, well, what are the experiences that this enables? So Dina wants to know if you can tell us a little bit about how you test your attractions and interactions before you put them out in public. Well, we have people called golden butts. You're gonna back me up on this? So from me, what's that? Play testing. Play testing. I was starting with specific. In the starting from if you're going to move somebody around, having somebody who is super sensitive to movement and can really articulate, all right, this movement is making me feel this way and this movement is making me feel this way and then taking that out to every discipline and you start with the specialists and then you go out and play test and understand because... Among ourselves, even. What I, yeah. We're our own best little audience, test audience, right? How do we test it? And Imagineer kids are some expert play testers at this point. The amount of articulate critique of a new attraction that a 12 year old Imagineering kid will give you is humbling. Barry. But I think you're right, because we're about us actually being the guinea pigs in many cases because I mean, most of us, there's a reason we work at Disney. I mean, we're big fans of what we do. I mean, it's a great company to work for and I think we want to see everything succeed and we really want to like these things as well. But I mean, there's from, you know, testing ride systems is one thing. There are other attractions that we can test in-house. I'm going back to Toy Story Mania which we mentioned a little bit earlier. Did you work on that? That was before my time. We actually had one of the pods set up in our concept lab and not only did Imagineers play it all day long but we invited people from the neighborhood and Imagineers kids as Amy said. So there are many different ways that we can do this but sometimes it's instinct, like a roller coaster, you know? Right, we all want it to be finished before it's done. A lot of things, you know, then again, technology empowers us to try to experience some of this early on and we use a lot of off-the-shelf type of things to test out what is the least amount that you need to move people, move them emotionally, move them physically. What is the least amount? So we test all the time to see sort of like what's working and because there's a lot of parts and pieces. And as, you know, we each, you know, pride ourselves in being experts in our own fields and bringing our kind of depth of experience, some of us longer than others and being able to bring that to bear on what we're designing but we're all at the end of the day individuals and because the story, because that experience is ultimately happening in the minds and in the bodies of our guests, being able to invite them in and invite them whether in the form of our peers, in the form of our peers' families to be able to test and play test those things and understand, being able to ask afterwards, well, you tell me, what happened? How did that feel? And remember, a theme park is a living thing. It evolves. We're able to sort of modify it and evolve in ways that our guests tell us everything we need to know about what's working. Change out attractions that are working. Exactly, there's an iterative process. I mean, it is a living thing. And so the dialogue between our guests and us is an ongoing thing. And like, you know, it's a requirement to really like reading guest letters and reading the way people feel about the attractions and how they respond to instructional videos. We always are like making sure that people understand what they're doing. So testing goes on. And I guess we could sum it up with Walt Disney who said, you know, he loved working on the parks because he could shape them. I mean, when he did Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, it was in the can. I can't make any more changes. It's done. But the park is a living, breathing thing that we can continue to change and improve and make better and have people come back again and again and again. As is with all of our work, I imagine it at the lab and at Disney. So one final question because we're reaching the end of our talk, I imagine there's a lot of you in the audience that are interested in learning more about how you all became Imagineers. Do you have advice to the students about how they should practice or how what you learned that made you exceptional Imagineering candidates? Sure. I mean, my story is, I guess, the more recent. So I'll start. I never thought I'd be an Imagineer. I had no idea. I didn't grow up in a family that went to the parks. I didn't grow up in a Disney household. Most of my Disney parks experience has been as a professional Imagineer. But it was one of those moments of it was perfect and I was out making experiences. I was out making immersive experiences. It's so nice that we now can all agree that that's a thing. And being actually getting, I got a call from an Imagineer who was trying to do something and had heard about my work and said, hey, would you come consult? And then one thing led to another and it's worked out. My parents are also really glad that they finally can understand and explain what it is I do because for them saying I make immersive experiences wasn't really helpful. So saying I'm an Imagineer and being able to ground that in the parks even though they don't go themselves, that's a thing that they understand. So that was very exciting for them. I too never thought I would be an Imagineer. I did not know what it was. We were not a Disney family either. But I got an internship because of just things that happened in my life and I tried very hard not to be an Imagineer forever like thinking this can't be it. And it just kept getting more and more interesting and more and more engaging. And so with the access, you guys all have access to us. And I think that that's the really important part about the membership is that you all have access and there are people in the audience. There's Emily, like if it's Imagineering is what you wanna do or a place you wanna work. Remember, I believe that you are all Imagineers just by being here at the lab or at the school and that is just a state of mind. So it's not, so if it's access to the company you already have it. We're already sort of in dialogue about being like access to Imagineering. Yeah, and I would add from my experience in turning at Walt Disney Imagineering, part of it is just being curious about a lot of different things and wanting to pursue many different skills because at Imagineering you wear a lot of different hats. And so being able to both practice and then create works that you can talk about to other people that involve many different processes and disciplines can only help you if you're interested in becoming an Imagineer. In the, just the spirit of being really curious and going after something that fascinates you, there are over 140 disciplines at Imagineering and so there's, if you are fascinated about something chances are it overlaps with something that Imagineering does too. So be fascinated, be excited about what you're making and try making new things. Yeah, do something. Just make something, and that already is the first step to being an Imagineer. That was my story. Where you go? All right, well thank you everybody so much for coming to our talk. Can we all give a big round of applause to the Walt Disney Imagineers who are joining us? Thank you. Thank you guys. Thank you guys. This has been a real treat. I'm very, very appreciative to our guests, Sarah, Dave and Amy for making time for us. And I also wanna say a big thank you to the Media Lab community, especially the director's office and the communications team for giving. All of us such this incredible opportunity to engage with Walt Disney Imagineering. And thank you, Emily. Nicely done. Thank you. All right, thanks everybody.