“Disney, in its park division, builds these giant things, but it takes a continent or half a continent to support each one,” says Joe Garlington, interactive creative director for DisneyQuest. Larger attractions at Walt Disney World or Disneyland can handle thousands of people an hour, but the smaller space of something like DisneyQuest just can’t deal with that sort of throughput without using things like VR. “Without, it would have been hard to imagine a scenario under which you could create those kind of immersive experiences,” DiNunzio says. VR meant each ride had less of a footprint than other attractions, so by staying small, VR allowed the DisneyQuest model to imitate the functions of much larger rides. These spaces could only ever house so much, relative to Disney World’s 40 square miles. “These two things were sort of going on in conjunction.” Making a mountain out of a molehillĭisneyQuest’s design, described by many speaking for this story as a “theme park in a box,” meant that space was at a premium. “They were pitching that, and they were looking at what we were doing with Aladdin as a kind of prototype to prove out the technical effectiveness and the consumer appeal of this sort of thing,” Schell says. And, according to Schell, they wanted the studio’s VR work to play a significant role. The pitch was simple: a chain of location-based entertainment centers in every major city. “That was very much the vision.”Īnother group within the company - headed up by Joe DiNunzio as strategic project lead - had a different idea, however. “The VR studio was very focused on creating virtual reality attractions for the parks,” Schell says. Jesse Schell joined Disney the VR studio in 1995 as a show designer after seeing the initial Aladdin ride that was installed at Epcot Center in Disney World. While not technically responsible for DisneyQuest itself, Disney had created a VR studio that ended up designing the majority of these attractions, with outside contractors designing out the rest, and Imagineering ultimately installing them. It’s important here to distinguish between “DisneyQuest,” the buildings and initiative, and “DisneyQuest,” the rides and attractions that went inside them. “But the goal was to buy our way into the future, to learn about VR 10-plus years before everyone else.” “We knew the equipment was too expensive to be practical,” says one former employee who asked not to be named because their current employer hasn’t permitted them to do interviews, though they are no longer at Disney. “Since Disney was willing to apply the resources to buy the very best supercomputers to run and to build, internally, the very best head-mounted display for comfort it seemed like it was a very unique place to actually explore this space that was otherwise not something you could do at home.”ĭisneyQuest was about more than just virtual reality, but for many who worked there, it presented an opportunity to work on these projects that felt ahead of their time. “At the time it was very expensive to do virtual reality anything,” says former designer Aaron Pulkka. The headsets were so heavy they had to be suspended from the ceiling, and the high-end Silicon Graphics computers used for the software quickly raised the costs. These were elaborate experiments, with hardware costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and headsets referred to internally as “gator vision,” due to the front sticking out like an alligator’s head. Other attractions - like the cars - weren’t strictly VR, but many dabbled in augmented reality. With Ride the Comix, players lived out what it would be like to jump into a superhero comic book. With Aladdin’s Magic Carpet Ride, players zoomed down a virtual recreation of Agrabah’s streets. The five-story, 100,000-square-foot space at Walt Disney World housed an arcade and remote-controlled cars, but it also contained some of Disney’s earliest work in virtual reality. In 1998, Disney launched the original DisneyQuest.
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