What Does Innovation Mean to You?

Innovation Poem: An inspiration → a revelation → a bold creation → determination → implementation→ consternation, appreciation → iteration → celebration.

Carolyn Wendell, Google for Education

Innovation is significant positive change. It’s a result. It’s an outcome. It’s something you work towards achieving on a project. We help deliver innovative, powerful experiences with breakthrough creative solutions. We build immersive experiences that challenge the limits of reality and fire the imagination. Innovation is a driving force in the themed entertainment industry.

It is not always about creating something that doesn’t exist but expanding on our current horizons and burgeoning new ideas from nuances in our present day creations. One of the many initiatives currently challenging our team is the integration of Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality into themed entertainment.

For years we have focused as an industry on how to create physical elements in themed destinations that guests will treasure. But now our audiences are being enticed by the virtual world and engaging with media elements that are part of the imagination and utilize the technology that we interact with on a daily basis, whether it’s cellphones or head mounted displays (HMD’s).

We’ve had to stop and ask ourselves, how do we effectively utilize virtual reality or augmented reality in a themed destination, when it is something that will be available in your living room now? There is no simple answer to this question, but one of the overarching elements has always come to mind is storytelling. Storytelling is a keystone to almost every project we touch, and thankfully storytelling is a form of innovation with no boundaries.

As forms of entertainment become increasingly sophisticated, our designers and developers are hard at work creating new products and tools that may be seen in a theme park. In 2007, we were faced with the design and full media production of Dragon’s Treasure, a dome theater with a capacity of 600 people per show, and physical scenic elements integrated with a 360-degree film. Little did we know this would be our first step in the realm of virtual reality, where content is produced and meant to surround the guest at every turn of their head. CircuMotion ® Theater is now another frontier we are embarking on where we’ve patented technology to engage guests in a surreal environment while moving them in various degrees of freedom.

But while the technology and hardware continue to advance, it’s the human element we seek to continue growing, the storytelling. We see innovation as an inspiration for our team to continue diving into the unknown.