To celebrate my daughter’s twelfth birthday we went to “The Happiest Place on Earth”, which is not true because “she who must be obeyed” got soaked on the Grizzly River Run and was unhappy all day.
There were two things that struck me during my two-day trip, apart from the spectacular discovery that Space Mountain is absolutely b-awesome if you’ve had a few cocktails. And no, I did not drink and drive on Autotopia, I was driven by my 12-year old, in what I imagine will be a recurring event when she can drive a real car.
The two things were both technology related: Photos and Tomorrowland. I would love to know the workflow, infrastructure and policy surrounding taking photos of “guests” enjoying the rides and attractions. I tried entering into a conversation with various “cast members” on the topic, but they were all clueless, which on reflection is indicative of how seemless the setup is. Whether you have your photo taken on a ride or standing next to Jessie (from Toy Story II), everything is centrally located. If you don’t buy it immediately on exiting the ride – understandable as you try to retain the contents of your stomach – you can access it from a store on Main Street, through a touchscreen interface, based on the ride and the approximate time you took it.
I was impressed how quickly you can sift through this huge amount of visual data using only two pieces of metadata and a touchscreen. It took less than one minute to find myself screaming like a girl on California Screamin’. By comparison, it takes my forever to find what I’m looking for from our collection, using a free text search and more CCO metadata fields than you can shake a stick at.
The other thing I’d love to know is why they call it Tomorrowland. It isn’t, or maybe it is. If the future is just full of mostly none-functioning touchtables and XBox360 games, then Tomorrowland it is. I haven’t seen so many non-functioning interactives since I went to <insert severely under-funded museum name here>.
The coolest thing by far was the Tomorrowland kitchen sink which featured a sleek faucet that miraculously appeared and disappeared from the countertop, under voice command. Curiously, this only worked when a “cast member” asked the kitchen for water – I tried asking for Whiskey but that didn’t work. I couldn’t tell if there was a secret button or if it was just bad speech recognition. Even more curious, the whole faucet-sliding-in-and-out-of-the-hole-event was strangely reminiscent of a NatGeo documentary on the sex life of Whales.
I looked Tomorrowland up on Wikipedia – even Disney refer to it as “Yesterdayland”.
May 20th, 2009 03:48
To understand how the photo systems work, see this companies website: http://www.picsolve.com/
Basically, they are shutter-less digital cameras linked with fiber optics to a central computer.
About the sorting, part of the reason that you were able to find yourself so fast is because you were looking for a recognizable image (yourself) in a group of unfamiliar images. As long as the software (and you) do the job to limit it to a reasonable time & location, then the number of photos that you will need to sort should be reasonable.