Very good points on the phonetic names. But a simple checkbox to opt out should save those that hate the idea from having to participate. From a purely corporate goal standpoint, this was the Transformational aspect: convert the entire park into an experience.
I always thought this technology sounded great but would be impossible to implement. A Small World boat can holed 15 passengers, so how can a sign say Sayonara to all of those passengers in that boat? Does the ride stop at the exit and flash each name for 15 seconds? Is one passenger singled out for this special treatment while the rest of the passengers wish it had happened to them and feel marginalized?
You're right , but that's not what Disney was advertising with MM+. This was supposed to be interactivity for the masses. But it's really immaterial , because I doubt it will happen.
. FP+ was underwhelming, though. I don't have an issue with a fastpass system being electronic and more easily accessible across the park/online...it's the new restrictions that are really meh for us.
I'm guessing that if it costs one more penny, it absolutely will not happen.
And sadly for us, that one new idea is the worst part of it for us. We love MBs for the hotel room, tickets and photos. It was really convenient for that! We never link CCs to hotel room keys (MBs or otherwise), so that's not a feature we'll likely ever use. And we did enjoy decorating the bands..DH got tons of compliments on his Dr. Who inspired vinyl decal on it
"ahhh...Clem"
Copyright 1971, Firesign Theater.
(Yes, about 35 years ago.)
Most of MM+ is stuff that you will never see, and most of the budget went to wiring the parks, built in the earliest in the mid 1990's, with fiber optic Ethernet links, pervasive Wi-Fi, and then putting that to use. The refurbishment of PoC? That's to put MM+ technology in, among other things, but you won't see it.
Before, when rides went down and required repair, the cast members at the ride must notify WDI, who come over and then must diagnose the issue with tools in situ, before it can be repaired. MM+ means that WDI can know of ride performance problems before they're broken, have parts ready and replace them overnight - all without you knowing. In individual attractions, the individual sound tracks are stored locally and read off of flash storage, but now they sit on redundant systems elsewhere and are streamed in when the local parts fail. Ride availability gets better, ride utilization gets better, and the parks and traffic flow is restored to the way the parks were designed to be used.
The guest interactivity part is such a small portion of what's going on in MM+ as to be almost laughable. 38,000 Wi-Fi enabled door locks, changed while the rooms were mostly occupied, hundreds of thousands of Wi-Fi access points, miles upon miles of fiber optic cable, tens of thousands of Ethernet switches, and innumerable routers and other hardware, not to mention datacenters of servers and other state of the art infrastructure. It literally brought the backbone of WDW from the 1980's into the 21st century, and can now track crowds properly to make the experience overall better for everyone, by providing crowd redirection at will.
And that's all before any of the personalization bits come into play.
He didn't make it. We got it from an online store we read about here. I'll message you the link to the Dr Who decal
In your reply, I'll go with a lack of understanding of how IT capital expenditures on a large scale are handled being what's missing. Unlike many other things, Disney literally couldn't spend money for the last 40 years, they had to spend it all on one chunk. IT equipment tends to fall into two categories: things that can be updated every year as the manufacturers release new models, such as servers and desktops, and items where technology changes so slowly that you only can update them on 5+ year intervals. Fiber optics, generators, battery power systems, and most networking equipment is on the longer cycle. Because of this, IT budgets are broken into capital improvement and maintenance expenditures; and installing the infrastructure to move from legacy systems to IP based systems must fall into capital improvement. The ongoing maintenance part is that, as rides undergo refurbishment, new features are added - but that required that an IP system be in place, first. (I won't go into the steps that must happen to keep it running in the future, but that's not cheap, either).
The narration comes off of the same flash storage as the music does. That seems like a power issue, and Pooh to my knowledge hasn't been updated to MM+ yet - its last major refurbishment was in 2010; the two day closure in 2013 wasn't long enough to do a conversion on a ride.
