Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean Online

I don’t often blog about Disney and VR together, mainly because I left Disney in 1997 and they’ve been virtually off the map for the last 10 years. Did they go to sleep because I left? Hardly. It’s the other way around. But I’m writing to note that this may be changing, finally, and hopefully for the best.

I joined the VR Studio in 1994, about two months before the first Aladidn VR ride was due to be installed in Epcot center. The VR Studio was started a few years earlier by three guys who realized the time was right (if you had the money) to bring VR and high-end entertainment together. Before then, I can’t think of a single example of immersive 3D entertainment that was more than a tech demo.

Given a top-notch team and a roughly $20M budget, even in 1994, one could do quite a bit. If you didn’t get to personally experience Aladdin as a VR ride, I’ll assert that the graphics were at least as good as most modern 3D games and a rock-solid 60hz (the computer cost $700k a piece originally, and later hosted 3 simultaneous rides). Fancy rendering wasn’t an issue, since it’s a cartoon. But what the veteran artists and engineers were able to achieve was something of a first — a 3D virtual "dark ride" with actual story and interactivity to boot. It’s also worth noting that Aladdin was actually multiplayer — one of the early ones — except no one ever saw that part, as two or more flying carpets in the world apparently didn’t make much story sense. Even still, Disney bought itself a piece of the future, by gaining the technical experience we all realized would apply to your desktops and living rooms soon enough. In fact, that future came even faster than we could have expected with the work of NVidia, Sony, and ATI.

Skip forward two years to 1996 and DisneyQuest, a venue designed in part to take advantage of Disney’s huge technological lead. I managed to contribute to a couple of rides there: Jungle Cruise VR (using 3D input for rowing, for which the Wii’s new controller would fit quite well), Build-your-own Roller Coaster (predating the hit PC games). But DisneyQuest largely failed on the whole. I’ll chalk it up to competition from the home — from consoles — and from internal politics too, wild-west style, which trickled down from the top, and, of course, from a lack of social engineering in DQ’s public spaces. They were expensive and not as much fun.

You see, Disneyland is a Virtual World. Yes, the meatspace version. Disney mastered the art of putting multiple users in one big happy place, most out of temporal sync with each other, but all having fun and at least knowing that everyone else is too. They lost that with DisneyQuest, and they failed to reinvest in keeping the technology bleeding edge, which was the initial draw. Maybe it was too high a goal to attain. But the vision of the VR group was shut out too. For example, when I helped pitch the equivalent of Star Wars Galaxies to DQ in 1996, they balked, saying it was too hard. The concept for "Crazy Taxi" may have been accidentally given to Sega. And a form of "virtual pets" that guests could design and nurture from home also fell by the wayside.

The VR Studio, though they made at least two of the other DisneyQuest rides, largely fell by the wayside too. I don’t know the full inside story after 1997, but I heard they got eaten up by the online group, and perhaps went through several cycles on the sidelines, doing demos just trying to survive. They came out with ToonTown eventually, which made some good inroads in child-safe on-line spaces. And now (well, in 2007) Pirates of the Caribbean Online gets its shot.

I’m really hoping this one takes off. Disney managed to take a huge lead early on and disappear from the history of 3D entertainment. I’m also hoping that as Ed Catmull and John Lasseter of Pixar take over Disney’s core R&D, they can refocus on technology creation instead of the next, next scheme for delivering DRM-laden movies at home. Because, ultimately, if they can combine Pixar’s skill in animation and storytelling with the technology of VR, things could truly get interesting again.

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