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Disney’s RFID "Magic Band" arrives on the FCC
- Thread starter GrumpyFan
- Start date
puntagordabob
Well-Known Member
According to the article they do not know what this is for... LOL if they had come here we all could have told them WHAT it is for! 
PeoplemoverTTA
Well-Known Member
Pictures of the "designer" wristbands that will be available are popping up on Twitter...
Rob562
Well-Known Member
Pictures of the "designer" wristbands that will be available are popping up on Twitter...
Let me guess... Plain plastic is free, or you can pay $5 for one of the upgraded covers for the bands...
I think we've discovered their plans to recoup some of the NextGen investment...
-Rob
flynnibus
Premium Member
The dizfanatic site seems to have tons of art and images that I haven't seen posted elsewhere related to the RFID project. Check out their collection here - http://dizfanatic.com/diztech012.aspx
melflip8
Well-Known Member
We wear them for MNSSHP and MVMCP and it doesn't bother me. Now, 4 or 5 days of it? Could get annoying, I guess. But, I am sure the benefits are going to outweigh the perceived annoyance of wearing one.
Surely, they do focus group testing for this?
njDizFan
Well-Known Member
The thing I cannot quite understand is how monitoring of attendance levels could possibly be inacted. For these type of readers they would have to install hundreds if not thousands around the parks in order to have the proximity to detect attendence. We don't see these springing up around bathroom entrances and infron of every queue and around the restaurants. How exactly would they use these to monitor patterns unless they are within feet or inches of the crowds they are monitoring?
So unless you see the HAL2000 Mickey eye in front of that bathroom entrance they can't possibly know how many people are in there.
So unless you see the HAL2000 Mickey eye in front of that bathroom entrance they can't possibly know how many people are in there.
danlb_2000
Premium Member
To get a good idea of crowd patterns they would only really need to monitor when people enter or exit a restaurant, ride, store or attraction which are also the easiest places to monitor. They could also put some receivers long the parade route if they wanted to monitor that.
flynnibus
Premium Member
They already know how many people are in the park - so there is no need to monitor the park as a whole.. the turnstiles do that within reason. But they could improve upon the existing system by improving the count on people exiting using the RFID system. They would get better counts and know if a particular person is in the park or not.
What they would monitor is areas of interest. You only have to wire up as much as you are interested in. And since the bands have a radio transmitter, the range may be sufficient to not require a heavy overlay of monitoring stations.
Areas I could see them monitoring...
- seating areas in a QS restaurant
- parade viewing areas
- open performance areas
- congestion problem areas
- monitoring key performance corridors
- instantaneous capacity monitoring in key stores (would drive metrics like knowing how long people stay in a shop, watch how they move through a shop, get better metrics on how browsing leads to purchases or not, could see if a particular display actually lead to a purchase, etc)
- etc
As much as the bathroom joke gets thrown around.. its a good example of 'its not worth it'. Simple doorway clicks would be a better monitor of usage in simple places like that. But a shop, because there are so many performance metrics and variables they can tweak... that is an area that is very enticing to wire up so that behavior can be monitored and changes can be evaluated.
PeoplemoverTTA
Well-Known Member
These seem much thicker and better-made than the hard ticket event wristbands. I don't have a problem with them per se, but I do have high skin sensitivity to any kind of bracelet in the heat (I break out in a horrible rash with any kind of bracelet in the heat, for a few hours - a weeklong vacation could be a problem!), so I'll definitely have to come up with a personal alternative, whether it's on my belt loop, bag, or something else entirely.
Figments Friend
Well-Known Member
Heh hehe...i was thinking the same thing, or at least assumed Disney would charge a fee to enable Guests to *customize* there very own bracelet.
*This could be bigger then Pins and Vinylmation..!!!* says someone in the Merchandising Dept...
danlb_2000
Premium Member
Now that idea has a lot of potential.
ulto22
Active Member
Something that RFID will be useful for that I don't know if it has been discussed is Lost Parents.
A castmember finds a kid wandering about and waves some tool over his arm, some control center or guest relations gets a notice of the area the castmember is holding the kid and hopefully direct the parents there.
Make a stressful event for a kid a little bit faster.
A castmember finds a kid wandering about and waves some tool over his arm, some control center or guest relations gets a notice of the area the castmember is holding the kid and hopefully direct the parents there.
Make a stressful event for a kid a little bit faster.
danlb_2000
Premium Member
Legoland Denmark actually offered a service like this back in 2004.
http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/view/921
ulto22
Active Member
Thanks for the article. Legoland had there stuff together way before many parks.
I think the main difference now is that everyone will have a wristband instead of renting for 3 euro and the amount of scanners in Disney Parks will be exponentially larger, making it a faster and more efficient system than originally used in Legoland. Still a very cool concept none the less, I think Disney will be able to do some very cool things with this in the future.
I think the main difference now is that everyone will have a wristband instead of renting for 3 euro and the amount of scanners in Disney Parks will be exponentially larger, making it a faster and more efficient system than originally used in Legoland. Still a very cool concept none the less, I think Disney will be able to do some very cool things with this in the future.
That should help a lot if the bus stops at the parks count everyone that enters the queue (as well as exiting the queue by getting onto the bus - have a sensor at both ends), so they can see where the long queues are, and how long people are waiting.
Wouldn't necessarily work at the hotels (although it may work at All-Stars as they have separate queues for each ride) - I wish that they had a button that you could press for each park which would be connected to a computer system somewhere so that they could send busses for the parks that people want to go to, instead of repeats of ones that have just been - although, I wonder, would it be possible for a sensor to read what ride your first Fastpass+ ticket is for, find out which park it was in, and then send a bus for that park? Wouldn't work for DTD or the waterparks though.
flynnibus
Premium Member
Even simpler - it just monitors an area and counts how many people are in that area and if that number is high for greater than a time window - you assume those people are waiting for a bus. Even better, you can refine the logic to exclude background noise by knowing when buses come.. and if X buses have come and that tag is still in the area, you can assume they aren't going to get on a bus so they are background noise and exclude them from your people count.
Or imagine kiosks where you swiped your card, and said where you were trying to go.. or simply a map, that if you tapped your bracelet on the map to where you wanted to go.. and that is data fed into the system too. Monitors on a bus could then read if a tag got on a bus (again through proximity instead of swipes), and then wipe that request from the system.
Disney has to seriously limit individual tag swipes.. that is a huge time consumer and requires the customer to actually do it.. which inherently they will resist unless there is a direct reward for doing so. Swiping to say 'I got on the bus!' doesn't reward the guest.. only Disney.. so they won't do it. That's why having the ability to read tags over distance is such a huge deal.
A 'request map' is a very intuitive model that would not be hard to implement that guests would likely use. Much cheaper and much more reliable then a touch screen or other system. The only problem to solve would be handicap accessibility. And for that, a simple counter version at the correct height might be the answer. Would also make an easy location to install Braille version.
Victor Kelly
Well-Known Member
I believe admission to the parks, room key, fastpass, and queue monitoring would be top priorities.
All the other stuff is icing on the cake for Disney.
I am tracked every where I go. I go through an airport and I get more attention because I was a gun collector, and had a lot of permits for a lot of stuff. Which is cool by me, since I obey the law, I never worry.
We are tracked 24-7 now. From what we buy and where we go, to what we watch, and read. I dont like it but the world is what it is.
All the other stuff is icing on the cake for Disney.
I am tracked every where I go. I go through an airport and I get more attention because I was a gun collector, and had a lot of permits for a lot of stuff. Which is cool by me, since I obey the law, I never worry.
We are tracked 24-7 now. From what we buy and where we go, to what we watch, and read. I dont like it but the world is what it is.