Disney released a fascinating new episode of the YouTube series “We Call It Imagineering.” There’s been so much to unpack, but I’m going to home in on one topic I’m particularly interested in—augmented reality (AR) glasses. In this opinion piece, I’m going to discuss my thoughts on screen time in the parks and why these glasses are exactly the wrong way forward. I’m keeping this post ad-free.
Warning: No Rope Drop Timestamps Here
Some quick editorial notes before I start. First, this post is entirely just opinion on an issue that has no immediate practical impact on visiting Disney World. There are no timestamps. There are no tips on how I’d use AR glasses for Lightning Lane strategy (well, “refresh. refresh again. refresh again. BOOK THAT! dang. refresh. refresh…”).
Second, whatever “judgmental” attitude you may discern in this post, it’s in large part directed inward, at myself. Which is to say, if you feel like this post is critical of you and things you do (like be on your screen)—I’m right there with you!
“I Put Some Spells On You”
Let’s start with a quote from Bruce Vaughn, President and Chief Creative Officer, Walt Disney Imagineering, from that recent episode of “We Call It Imagineering”:
Extended reality is going to reinforce the shared experience. A big differentiator for us is that you’re there together with friends and family and people that you care about. And every time you have to look down at a device or a phone, it breaks that spell…
“Extended reality” refers—at least in part—to augmented reality glasses. These are glasses with lenses that act as tiny screens, allowing you to see content in your glasses, on top of (augmenting) the reality in front of you.
Now, the bolded point in the above quote is definitely something I agree with Bruce on, though I’d probably put it differently. Bruce is right that Disney parks “put a spell” on us—they’re meant to transport us to different worlds, both in their physical sense and in the emotional connections they engender.
But there’s another spell at work in his quote—the spell your phone or other smart device puts on you. Bruce essentially points out that as the phone’s spell takes over, it breaks the spell of the Disney parks. It fractures the shared experience Disney hopes to create.
As I’ll get into, though, I think with a move toward AR glasses, Disney isn’t refuting spellbinding technology, they’re surrendering to it. They’re conceding that the future of theme parks is screen-based—wrongly giving in to the idea that built environments are no longer enough.
That huge point of distinction aside, we can all probably agree that, in the current arrangement, the Disney parks experience is heavily marred by the practical requirement that guests use their phones to navigate their days.
I’ve spent some time developing a blog post that could help people have a good, device-free trip, but so far the option that makes the most sense is not appealing—buy Lightning Lane Premier Pass. With Premier Pass, you don’t have to worry about most waits, and you don’t have to manage Lightning Lane slots.
But with prices in the $300 to $500 range per person, this simply isn’t a practical solution. Better to sacrifice one of your family members to the device gods, and just ask them to basically live on their phone the whole trip.
“It’s Not Screen Time, It’s Time That Happens to be on a Screen”
There’s a growing stigma against screen time, and with good reason. Unfortunately, being in the Disney parks often necessitates being on a phone in front of one’s kids, something most parents try to avoid in excess. I think in this context, many of us hope that the end—trying to plan a great vacation—justifies the means—being buried in our screens. Does it?
In a single day in the parks, I lose track of the number of times I say things like:
“Sorry I can’t talk right now I have to get this Lightning Lane for you.”
“No I can’t look at that right this second I’m trying to put together this mobile order so we can all eat lunch.”
“Wait wait wait wait. Just give me a second I need to figure out these wait times to see where we should go next.”
A sophisticated adult understands a few things about these scenarios.
I honestly don’t like being on my phone so much in front of my kid.
I definitely get a dopamine boost from booking Lightning Lanes, so I’m not doing it just for my kid.
My screen time is, practically, a necessary part of putting together a “good trip”. This is particularly true for kids in-the-know, who want to go on specific rides and get FOMO as the hours tick by and they haven’t made it onto Peter Pan’s Flight yet.
A kid—even a sophisticated one (or, particularly a sophisticated one?) sees none of that. They see a parent doing that thing that parents don’t like to do but that they sometimes do anyways—being on their phone when they could be giving attention to their kid.
It’s all too easy to write off this problem—parents have long been distracted by books, newspapers, television, radio, and so on. Why are modern devices any different? And why can’t my kid just appreciate that I’m on my phone building their awesome vacation?
Well, kids know that phones are mostly used these days for quick hit distractions. By 5 years old, most kids have seen the occasional fun TikTok on mom’s phone or played a quick few minutes of Pokemon Go! on dad’s phone. I’m the last person to be critical of that, but we have to acknowledge that our own behavior teaches kids that phones are most often being used for scrolling social media or playing games.
Building off that point, modeling device usage models addictive behavior. Even if kids can’t distinguish between when you’re reading a book on your phone and when you’re doomscrolling (they probably can a lot of time time), they’re going to naturally interpret your behavior as what it looks like—and what it probably actually is—which is some sort of addiction. This extends to the parks, where, however good our intentions, we’re once again being sucked into our phones.
So there’s a problem. As Bruce Vaughn puts it, “it breaks that spell” to have a family member constantly buried in their device. The proposed solution, apparently? Just hide the device in your glasses.
Image by ChatGPT (see, I’m not a luddite)
“If You Can’t Build It, You Can Just Augment It”
The earlier quote from Bruce Vaughn is tied to a discussion about a partnership Disney has with Meta to use Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses for both guest and backstage applications. (FWIW, the backstage applications, like Imagineers being able to augment their view of some area to see what a final design will look like, sound pretty dope.)
On the guest experience front, Imagineer Asa Kalama points out that the glasses have cameras, microphones, and speakers. In his words, one potential application of these glasses is:
“It allows us to put a virtual theme park guide in their ear…I can ask questions [about the land], and I get the answer right in my ear.”
A bit of a digression. I want to know what Joe Rohde would have to say about this. It’s been some years since I spent most of my free time watching every clip of Joe on YouTube, but his understanding of how people interact with the built environment is astounding and, importantly, multi-leveled. While I’m sure his response would surprise me in some way, I would be shocked to learn he wants a guest walking around Animal Kingdom being spoon-fed a bunch of explainers on what they’re seeing.
My personal, off-the-cuff, opinion on this topic is that if you’re trying to build realistic spaces, the spaces themselves should “say” exactly what a real space would say. The space should speak for itself. Being told what real-world architecture inspired the space I’m in breaks the spell. Being told what some in-world signage means by a device instead of discerning the context myself from the scene breaks the spell.
“Meta, how much is that doggie in the window?”
Asa mentions another application of the glasses, too:
“Maybe I want to learn a little bit more about a merchandise item for my child. All I have to do is look at it, ask, ‘tell me more information about it,’ and then, right in my ear, I get all of the product information.”
Another digression—there’s a layer of privacy concerns I don’t have time to touch here. As someone who makes a living off ads people see online, I’m not one to criticize too heavily the basics of “Person expresses interest in buying a widget, so widget companies run ads in the content Person consumes.”
But the idea of having some sort of presumably-AI guide attached to my head, collecting information on what merchandise I’m looking at, and theoretically able to tailor its real-world advice to me around that information is…perhaps a step further than I’m comfortable with.
Returning to the problem of disgruntled parents who can’t get enough information about Zurg Poppers just by looking at the packaging—this line is somewhat disingenuous sleight of hand. This isn’t a simple net win for the family who can now get more information about every toy to make sure its right for them.
Yes, parents shop for their children in the parks—a lot. But these conversations with the glasses are going to have plenty to do with merchandise that parents want, too. Disney is in the business of consumption, so I think we can all sort of see past the gloss on the idea that they’re just going to help us pick out a nice toy for Timmy.
More broadly, parents are going to be able to talk to the glasses about a whole range of things that may or may not be relevant to their kids. This is sort of the point. As Bruce put it:
If you can use extended reality. I never stop looking at the environment I'm in or at the people I'm with. It's going to be less disruptive.
And this is the crux of the argument—you can do everything you have to do on your phone, but without having to take out your phone.
Check wait times, book Lightning Lanes, place mobile orders, learn what “Fichwa Fellow” means—all without ever taking your device out of your pocket. If screen time is bad, this must be good, right?
“You’ll have to speak up, Daddy’s wearing his glasses.”
My main problem with the AR glasses is that the idea that they’ll restore a sense of togetherness is rooted in deception. Specifically, there’s an idea that if my family doesn’t see me being distracted, can it really bother them?
It’s a bonkers suggestion. I was at an extended family event some time back when I noticed a family member acting unlike her usual self. She didn’t have a screen in front of her, but her attention was awkwardly awry. She’d sometimes answer direct questions, but only after a delay, and inattentively.
There would be a ton of activity going on around her, and she’d have no idea. Then when the activity managed to pierce her force field, she’d erupt as if someone had ripped the phone she wasn’t using out of her hand. I chalked it up to my own misunderstanding—probably she always interacted this way and I just didn’t pay enough attention, or maybe she was going through something I don’t know about. I moved on.
Later in the trip, she bragged about her cool new headphones. They were small enough that other people wouldn’t even see them. She had been wearing headphones, ignoring us, listening to podcasts (those are the good things, remember?) the whole time. Flashback to the debut of Bluetooth headsets in the early 2000s.
I have little doubt that “extended” or “augmented” reality glasses would do the same thing…except it’ll probably be worse, because they’re literally screens.
Again, let’s look at that quote from Bruce Vaughn:
If you can use extended reality. I never stop looking at the environment I'm in or at the people I'm with. It's going to be less disruptive.
Let’s break this down.
First, “I never stop looking at the environment or at the people I’m with.” Well, this isn’t how augmented reality glasses work. They’re little screens. They literally put visuals in between you and the environment.
Second, “It's going to be less disruptive.” I think this misses the point—this is a bug, not a feature. Being able to instantly have a screen in front of you, is a bad thing. Having the “friction” (to borrow a Disney concept) of having to take out your phone before you get distracted is a better thing.
The problem isn’t the clunkiness of getting out our phone to be distracted. The problem is that we’re constantly being distracted. Making it easier to distract us by strapping the device to our heads doesn’t solve the problem, it exacerbates it.
Underlying this idea is a sad concession by Disney—that their physical parks just aren’t enough. Not only are the parks not enough to keep us off screens, but the best route forward is to transform the parks into a screens-first enterprise (because, again, the screen is literally between you and the park).
“I felt that there should be something augmented – some sort of an augmented amusement enterprise…”
A final two points I’ll reply to. First, maybe someone has gotten to the end of this post thinking “no, it’s better for my kids to just see me with glasses instead of seeing me with my phone.” But how long do you think it’ll take your kid to understand what you glasses are? And isn’t it worse to be in a situation where they never really know where your attention is?
My kid openly doesn’t like when I’m on my phone, and I’m proud of (and thankful to) them for that. I can’t imagine trying to pretend like I’m not on a device or, worse, leaving them with no clue of when I’m tuned in and when I’m off in my own augmented world.
Second, there’s this idea of the augmented world being “shared.” If everyone in your family (again, no time for the privacy digression) is wearing the glasses then you can all have a “shared” augmented experience.
All I can say to this is that we already have a “shared” experience we can have together as a family—it’s called “reality.” And if reality is too harsh sometimes—I get that. Walt Disney got that, too. And he had the idea “that there should be something built…where the parents and the children could have fun together.”
And so he (more or less) invented the modern idea of a theme park—a built environment with rides, entertainment, and atmosphere intentionally designed to give the gift of a good time for everyone who comes to that happy place.
That idea is threatened by a world where more and more we find ourselves being pulled into our devices. Should the world leaders in built amusement environments really be telling us the best way forward is…more screens, right in front of our eyes, all the time, between us and the world, between us and the people we love?
P.S. If you’d like to reduce your screen time, I primarily use Opal (I have not been paid by Opal, and I have not seriously tried other products).