The new Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser at Walt Disney World is far and away the most immersive experience Disney Parks have ever introduced. The two-day journey aboard the Halcyon puts guests front-and-center in the Star Wars universe as they experience its story every second they’re there. This kind of immersion will probably be used in more of Disney’s experiences going forward, but there’s one specific part of the Galactic Starcruiser that is actually looking to break ground on a new type of guest experience.
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There are a lot of characters onboard the Halcyon for guests to interact with, each helping to pull an individual’s journey in a different direction. The character that guests get the most time with, however, is a droid named D3-O9. D3 is an artificially intelligent character that is accessible in every single guest cabin. Each guest essentially has a personal D3 to share their experiences with, speaking to her as often or as little as they choose. D3 listens, remembers, responds, offers advice, and becomes part of the experience and story alongside the guest.
D3 is essentially a character geared specifically towards guest experience, allowing everyone to interact with her as much as they would another living character, evolving with each individual conversation.
“The goal was for this to be a character that you get to know, that changes based on how you interact with her, but also she’s along for the ride as well,” Dawson Dill, senior R&D Imagineer and D3’s creative lead, explained to ComicBook.com. “So as the events on the Halcyon Starcruiser unfold, those events affect her and how they affect her are made up with the decisions that the guest makes. So from a development perspective, I think it was a fun challenge to bring D3-O9 to life because it was a technology piece. It’s using speech recognition, natural language, understanding, whole bunch of fancy conversational design technology that we’ve been developing.”
“But then you have a narrative component because at the core it’s about a character,” he continued. “At the end of the day, you want to go in there and talk to a character and have that character shift and change. And also for us, the interaction is just as important as the words. So, are you betraying D3-O9? Are you trying to get D3-O9 to become your friend? Are you helping her to trick the First Order? Or are you helping the First Order to trick D3? There’s a lot of different ways we wanted to be able to play it and make sure that D3-O9 felt like just another member of the crew.”
Dill went on to say that D3-O9 is essentially a testing ground for this new A.I. technology. It’s easy to see how Disney could utilize this technology in a multitude of new ways going forward.
“I think Imagineering, traditionally and ever and forever, has always been looking at cool new ways to elevate things. I think that we see an opportunity with some of this technology to make more personalized connections and have ones that are more also connected to an evolving story,” Dill said. “So as you see, more and more immersive storytelling like Galactic Starcruiser, having characters that take different forms and want to engage in those same persistent ways, you’re going to need a platform like this.
“At the Imagineering R&D group, we’ve been working on this platform and D3-O9 is definitely the first, the limited play test to really put this out there for the first time. But the hope is that this is a platform that we think it can bring a lot of different Disney characters of life in different ways, on different mediums and different platforms. It’s been a long road to get here. We’ve been looking at a lot of this for a while, but this is sort of the first big stepping stone that we’ve put out in the water.”
With more characters like D3-O9 at different Disney parks and attractions, there’s no limit to just how much the guest experience can change and evolve.
