- This is a game engine.
- Can I say one other thing?
- Uh, sure.
- I don't even like to use the term "game engine."
"Real-time engine" is the more proper term.
- Okay, let's try this again.
(clears throat)
This is a real-time engine.
Specifically, it's an engine for building theme parks.
You know, these things.
- We like immersion, we like to go to places
and immerse ourselves in those experiences,
immerse ourselves in the stories
of those places, and immerse ourselves
in a relationship with the real world
or with a fantasy world in any way.
That is what theme parks are about.
- Historically, theme park rides
had only a few elements:
slow-moving carts, extravagant sets
and maybe some animatronics.
(people screaming)
Those experiences allowed park-goers
to transcend their reality
but the bar to transcend reality is higher now,
so there are more tools that theme parks have to use.
Pyrotechnics, cars on gimbals,
projection, augmented reality,
and now using VR and game engines
to design the rides themselves.
And it doesn't stop there
because the future of theme parks
might not even be physical.
We may all be living
in some Fortnite-style, extended universe, ever-present game.
I mean, what if your entire reality was virtual?
This is Hard Reset,
a series about rebuilding our world from scratch.
- Welcome to Disneyland.
To all who come to this happy place,
Disneyland is your land.
- What is Disneyland?
Well, it's a theme park, not an amusement park.
It's something different.
- That's Rick.
Come back, Rick.
A legendary former Imagineer and magician apparently.
- It wasn't just a collection of rollercoaster rides,
get on a thing, go really fast, okay, it's over.
It was something more than that.
It had this notion of immersing you,
not just in a socially different place
but to really take you away.
- Rick has been on the bleeding edge
of theme park tech since Disney World was built.
- ...special effects equipment to the projection system...
- I think the expression we all adopted
that we were the Epcot babies.
The clarity of what Epcot did
was really how you could take all sorts of ideas,
whether they're cultural ideas,
historical ideas, and create an immersive experience.
- My parents took me to Disneyland the first time
when I was three years old and I never looked back.
- That's Michael, former Jungle Cruise skipper
and consultant for Walt Disney Imagineering.
- This thrill of, how did they do that?
Seeing it happen before your very eyes,
like a magic trick - that's the feeling
that I've really been chasing my whole life.
- When rides were just moving cars,
models, and sets,
the tools needed were mostly sketches and models.
Oh hey, it's Walt Disney.
But with all the immersion that riders now demand,
the only way to prototype that
is with real-time engines.
That's why Michael created Worldbuildr.
- The Worldbuildr software helps you see
what happens in the space.
It's not just the architecture
but it's the show, the actual theatrics,
the entertainment that takes place within the facility.
When does this light turn on?
When does the speaker fire?
When does this ball of flame erupt from the ground?
In the real world, you have hundreds of people working
on these things, many different companies,
each with their own specialization
and their own scope.
- It's not one single individual
or one single discipline
that leads to the creation of anything.
It takes a village.
It takes a huge village.
- They all sort of get to the field
where the thing is being built
and they find mistakes. They find clashes
where they didn't necessarily communicate properly
with each other.
That's the friction point
that Worldbuildr is really trying to ease.
- VR is an incredible tool
for designing theme park experiences
because it's already totally immersive
but since you're already designing it in VR,
do these experiences need to be in the real world?
Galaxy's Edge, Disney's newest themed land
is a physical park.
But it also has a digital twin,
a VR app called Tales from Galaxy's Edge.
- You can put on your Oculus Quest
and step into the land
that previously you could only see
when you visited the park.
When you put the headset on,
you'll notice that all of the other guests are missing.
Now there's really no issue of throughput
or having to shuffle people through this thing
and now you can explore the parts of Galaxy's Edge
that maybe you didn't have a chance to.
- Welcome in!
- You can have more long-form conversations
with different aliens
or you can actually go into the cantina
because it's not packed to the gills
with annual pass holders.
You can actually go in there
and order a drink.
That's really the first instance
of anything like this
that's ever been done
where you can get a deeper dive
and a somewhat different view
of the same location by exploring its digital counterpart.
- With experiences like Tales from Galaxy's Edge,
the boundaries of a theme park have been extended.
And with AR, now the entire world is a theme park.
I experience this when my son and I play Pokemon GO.
Our reality has expanded
to accommodate an entire world filled with Pokemon
and for us, that's not fantasy,
it's just an expansion of our reality.
So picture a scenario where everyone had something
in their life, like Pokemon GO.
You could live in the Pokemon
or the Harry Potter wizarding world,
Marvel or the DC Universe
or it could be Victorian or '50s Americana or Western.
Your entire fantasy world connected by AR,
VR, movies, television, theme parks,
or even the way your Alexa or Siri sounds.
- It really blurs the line between the physical
and the digital
but it also blurs the line between me and a character.
Let's say I've customized myself
to be a smuggler or a warrior.
I get farther and farther away
from being myself and more and more close
to being sort of this character
within this world, this fictional world.
- This would be a hard reset
for how we think about reality.
And maybe that exacerbates digital echo chambers
and fragments our shared truths
but maybe it's inevitable
because it's not just theme parks
that are embracing this blurred line.
- Meow Wolf, immersive theater,
escape rooms, themed restaurants.
Themed entertainment is more popular
than it's ever been before.
Really what all of this technology means
is that it's finally possible
to deliver on the promise of the theme park,
which is the illusion that you're in a fantasy world.
- People seek experiences
that give them awe.
And if you don't have the means to do that physically,
why not embrace a digital reality
that makes that possible?
- Suddenly the whole world
becomes a little bit more interesting.
- If I had my druthers,
I'd want to live in the real world probably still
but I'll tell you what,
it's much easier than flying to Bali.
You put on this headset
and all of a sudden, it just feels like you're there.
- All of these opportunities for people
to lose themselves and be the other part
of themselves or make it something not like real life.
- Come back next time for another episode
of Hard Reset.
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