News PhotoPass at some character locations being replaced by automated cameras

[Casper Gutman]

Randomly taken from a distance. This doesn't improve my impression at all.

All the charm of surveillance camera shots.

 

[Mizzourah]

Pretty disappointed by this -- some of my favorite encounters at the park have been with ambitious and entertaining Photopass photographers. They can be like impromptu Citizens of Hollywood-lite. Genuinely, one of my favorite aspects of the park experience.

 

[Mark P.]

So, things are going well.

 

[Flynnwriter]

Fire all humans! No straws! Don’t open the Park during normal operating hours. Just charge for anyplace you might logically take your car and park.

 

[Calmdownnow]

My sister and I took her grand-daughter to WDW three years ago and traded in all of our FPs so that she could "visit" all of the princesses in MK. It was a magical experience for her and for her family. The photos taken by the professional photographers were just stunning. Those pics are proudly displayed in homes in the UK and Canada. Her autograph book has the pics mounted in it and her Dad's go to sleep ritual for many months included a re-enactment of the moments when she met those Princesses.

In contrast, the automatic pics taken on rides (e.g. Buzz Lightyear) with our other children are in boxes in the loft and have no real emotional resonance for our family.

This is a really stupid move by Disney that downgrades the meet and greet experiences and undermines the "brand" by making these experiences disposable rather then memory-making.

 

[invader]

I would love to be in some of these meetings where the decide to do things like this. If they think ideas like this are good imagine the asinine ideas they come up with that don’t get approved.

 

[Thelazer]

I said they would find many ways to offset having to raise wages.. but no one wanted to hear it..

 

[Macca250]

Just tried out the new automated camera at Town Square Theatre. Bought a dozen prints for the extended family.

 

[IanDLBZF]

Just tried out the new automated camera at Town Square Theatre. Bought a dozen prints for the extended family.
View attachment 326378
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[IanDLBZF]

And speaking of PhotoPass, over in Paris there seemed to have been a price increase of sorts over there.....

 

[lentesta]

Here are a few other AI/Machine Learning projects I'm aware of:

"Project Blush" is to automate the censoring of Photopass photos with inappropriate body parts, etc., in on-board ride photos. So no more "Flash Mountain." I'm told it's pretty hard to fool - it tends to err on the conservative side.

There's an ML agent project that attempts to use Disney characters for customer service. Imagine walking up to one of the Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom windows and asking them for restaurant or ride recommendations, or to buy tickets, find transportation, and so on.

There's definitely work being done on "mood recognition" through resort cameras. The idea is that you detect who's in a group, and the mood of the people in that group. If they appear grumpy, frustrated, etc., an alert goes off somewhere, and someone magically appears with a snack, a set of Fastpasses, something like that. Will be combined with long-range RFID.

"Data Lake" is the cloud-based platform on which this runs. It's Amazon for now, but I think it's platform-agnostic so they could move it to Google or Microsoft if needed. All the Orlando-based servers are migrating. All guest audio/video/images gets uploaded to this so that as-yet un-built machine learning algorithms can figure out things like "market segmentation", etc. The in-room "World Traveller" thing was a test of this, from what I understand.

Besides these, the people in Disney Research have to publish fairly often. They're worth following for conference papers, tweets, and the like, just to get an idea of what they're working on for the company.

 

[lazyboy97o]

There's definitely work being done on "mood recognition" through resort cameras. The idea is that you detect who's in a group, and the mood of the people in that group. If they appear grumpy, frustrated, etc., an alert goes off somewhere, and someone magically appears with a snack, a set of Fastpasses, something like that. Will be combined with long-range RFID.

Millions of dollars spent because basics like having adequate capacity taught in IAAPA classes somehow don’t apply to Disney.

 

[GiveMeTheMusic]

Millions of dollars spent because basics like having adequate capacity taught in IAAPA classes somehow don’t apply to Disney.

Look Disney is the disruptor okay??? - Bob Chapek

 

[Disone]

Unbelievable. Not only will the photos now look terrible, you're losing the human touch of having a real photographer.

7 or 8 bucks an hour really isn't that much to fork over.

I agree with you but starting pay at Disney will be $11 an hour starting this December. December 2018. But september 2019, less then a year from now it will be $13 an hour.

This maybe even an attempt to help offset that increased labor cost. Not quite the same as a budget cut because they're definitely going to be spending more money on labor. They're probably just trying to limit how much more.

 

[GeoffR]

Eliminating jobs, raising admission, adding ticketed events that used to be free, raising food and merch prices, raising hotel prices. All this price raising while their monorails are falling apart, attractions are in disrepair, theming is being thrown out the window...what is going on with this company? Every day it's something new that they are taking away.

 

[MissingDisney]

So, things are going well.View attachment 326368

Nice. So attentive they even made sure to have the same typos/errors in each personally written response.

 

[DisAl]

Here is a sentence from the reply I received from Disney when I emailed them asking it this was true.
"Given Guest interest in capturing specific moments during character greetings, we will be enhancing our approach to capturing the picture-perfect memory. This approach will be similar to what you currently experience with our attraction photos. " Really??? They think an automated system is going to capture "picture perfect" memories? That's bovine scatology.
Attraction photos are a pitiful excuse for real photography.
They just made Memory Maker next to worthless for my family. There is no way they can replace the interaction of a live photographer by just making more photos.
No more Memory Maker for us. I hope enough people stop buying Memory Maker as a result of this stupid decision that they will reverse it.

 

[mikejs78]

I'm.going to play devil's advocate here. If as @lentesta mentioned this is a Machine Learning initiative with multiple cameras taking photos from different angles, then it's possible that these photos could actually turn out nice given the variability in quality of Photopass photographers (I've had both truly excellent Photopass photographers and truly bad ones). There's a lot you can do with ML photography - and some of it does seem like magic (anyone who has tried the new night mode on the Google Pixel 3 will understand what I mean).

Now, this is all predicated on Disney doing ML well - and I'm not sure they have the same prowess in that area as, say, Google. But I'm willing to at least see the results before passing judgement. But if it's basically just a few cameras snapping a bunch of random pictures in forced poses without any intelligence to it, then yes, it will be awful.

 

[BigThunderMatt]

I agree with you but starting pay at Disney will be $11 an hour starting this December. December 2018. But september 2019, less then a year from now it will be $13 an hour.

This maybe even an attempt to help offset that increased labor cost. Not quite the same as a budget cut because they're definitely going to be spending more money on labor. They're probably just trying to limit how much more.

Photopass Cast Members are not union as I stated in a previous post. The contractual change would not affect them as they have no collective bargaining agreement. Base rate will go up across the board for all roles but that doesn't mean this was the reason they're making the cuts in photopass.

 

[Thelazer]

I'm.going to play devil's advocate here. If as @lentesta mentioned this is a Machine Learning initiative with multiple cameras taking photos from different angles, then it's possible that these photos could actually turn out nice given the variability in quality of Photopass photographers

If they can't get dining and fast pass reservations systems to work without DAILY crashes..
Then... I don't have much hope for this.