Re-engineering Star Wars Galactic Cruiser:

Why it failed and reimaging it SITEnetwork style!

The imagineering department at Disney is world renowned within the tourism industry. Always seen as the forward thinkers and pioneers, Disney has pushed the envelope and turned dreaming up new incredible adventures into a science.

So when at the Scottish National Tourism Conference, presenting the same day as the Imagineers about the Metaverse, you could say that I had a tough act to follow. Ann Morrow Johnson of Disney made a very compelling presentation about Star Wars Galactic Cruiser, a multi million jewel in the crown immersive “personalised” experience lasting two days at the Disney World theme park.

It captured the audience's attention in ways the blond guy talking about Metaverse (me) might not have. The audience was captivated, it was the talk of the town and large groups of delegates swarmed around Ann during our breaks. Including me!

The vision

The vision for the hotel and experience was bold and forward thinking. It promised to be the most experiential and “immersive” experience ever seen at Disney.

This was the sales pitch:

• A unique experience for every person who comes. This is known as personalisation. A good friend of SITEnetwork, Mauricio Prieto calls personalisation “the single most annoying idea ever dreamed up for tourism”. And for good reason we will get into later.

• Interact with creatures from the Star Wars Universe

• Ability to interact with features of the hotel as if visitors were really in the Star Wars universe such as feeling like you are on a star cruiser.

• Lightsaber training and duels woven into different storylines within the experience.

• Take part in secret missions that add personal choice to the experience.

• Bridge Operations training

• Costs $6000 usd per person

The Reality

Star Wars Battle Cruiser failed spectacularly. And there are many reasons, but let's go back to Mauricios point about personalisation as a starting point.

Personalised experiences were not personal nor unlimited in nature

Personalisation is problematic because in surveys visitors want it, attractions want to market it because visitors want it, yet, neither attractions or visitors can actually easily define what they mean by personalisation.

The visitors have a say in what they experience and that experiences are varied enough there's a reason to come back or the experience changes the next time you visit.

The problems for Disney though were:

1. You can't curate unlimited storylines in a confined space.
2. You can't get away with calling the inevitable limited range of options (be a Rebel, join the Empire, be a smuggler) an unlimited personalised choice.
3. The daily routine was so curated that it took away from “going immersive” i.e. for the duration of the experience in one direction or the other, ruining the immersion.
4. As a result of 1-3 there were very few return bookings.  Premium products that become “one and done” as an attraction rapidly run out of visitors to come and pay.

Too niche

 Cosplay with strangers in a confined space is not for everyone to say the least. Anyone neurodivergent or introverted isn't going to want to be involved.

Key characters were not available

 Ask any Star Wars fan who they want to meet in a Star Wars experience and the top answers will likely be Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Han Solo, Yoda, Obi Wan,Chewbacca. There was a lack of availability of these key characters to the extent that some were not appearing at all. A premium product minus the key characters sounds a bad idea. Someone is feeling the force.

Why the problems?

 This was a new project that was unlike anything Disney had attempted before and while they are famous for pushing the envelope, they usually do it incrementally and this was a leap into the unknown. Which makes some of the reasons they failed quite close to home:

They didn't listen to or react to feedback from fans before opening

It appears that they never brought fans into the planning in any way. Focus groups and testing helps enormously to adjust ideas into a better fit for the target market. According to many reports, they didn't do this, because in a normal Imagineering project it wouldn't be necessary. Fans were telling them it looked cheap, lacked a premium feel and made no sense.The trailer was deeply unpopular and yet nothing was changed. To understand the scale of this, there were 10 dislikes for every 1 like!

They didn't understand the fans

Star Wars fans want to see and experience things that are authentic. Rather than say being able to get access to props or unique access to media because you'd chosen to stay, what you got was a room, with no windows, and a TV projecting space. It was way too one dimensional versus what they tried to market it as.

They couldn't personalise the experience the way they wanted

 Back to Mauricio Prieto and the frustration he sees with personalisation. It comes about for two reasons. First, visitors routinely say they want it and attractions say they are aiming for it. Second, no one's really sure exactly what they mean by personalisation!

 As a result, its become a buzzword in the tourism industry that is something you must be seen to do but very open to interpretation. Here is the SITEnetwork take on personalisation. It is really about two things:

1. Choice for the visitor in such a way it feels personal to them
2. It's a process that involves the visitor setting some or all of the parameters of the experience themselves.

 In a confined space, like a museum or say, a Star Wars ship, this becomes very hard to achieve and so having any choice or any input becomes sufficient. With the Open Metaverse and Hybrid experiences played out virtually and physically this becomes much less of a problem, especially once AI is involved in elements of it!

SITEnetwork Re-Imagineering

 Now we've seen why the Star Wars experience hasn't worked, let's begin to reimagine how it could've been done if our team were the Imagineers on the job.

Differences between the Disney model and the Hybrid Metaverse model

 We are not limited to one physical space

 The great thing about  a hybrid phygital solution built to integrate with real world destinations is that the SITEnetwork and Parallel Worlds game board is essentially limited to anywhere we have a platform or presence in the world. This means crafting entertaining storylines, challenges, trails or visual experiences can happen anywhere from your own home, to a street corner in New York to a park in Mexico City or the Virtual Mayan Cities of Mexico.

We still need well thought out gamified experience, crafted in an entertaining way, in other words, to Imagineer, but our boundaries are not constrained to one building in a Theme Park.

We can be virtual and well as physical

Being able to move between the virtual and physical worlds within stories and adventures allows for so much  more variation and depth to the experience. Our canvas is the earth and the imperial cities of the Galaxy are layered content onto any destination in the network.

Stories and quests could play out in different parts of the world, initially curated as examples by our team but then handed over to users to curate and craft their own using our AR developer toolkit.

Bringing central characters to life

While Disney was careful about the IP it took over from LucasFilm when becoming the owner of Star Wars, it is a great shame that this meant they didn't want to include central characters into the experience, such as Darth Vader.

However, we are working with a comic book publisher who does see the value in a bit of IP flexibility for the way in which AR/VR can engage audiences and it is possible to do this without giving the IP away.

Having central characters in the experience makes it an inter-generational family adventure as the Star Wars OGs can get a trip down memory lane and younger ones can be engaged all within the same experience.

Accessibility & Inclusion

The Star Wars Hotel restricted those on a budget given the massive cost of the two night stay but our solutions would be open to all and far more cost effective, opening up Star Wars adventures to many more people around the world. With AI interactive characters that can be set up in multiple languages as well as to tell stories and interact with. I know I have some questions for Lord Vader, what about you?

 We can support including children on the autism spectrum as well in a number of ways:

• Sensory Experiences

• Predictable Instructions

• Flexible Interaction with others

• Focus on their interests

• Visual and Tactile Feedback

• Support for parents at Innovation Hubs (more on that later)

• Rewarding participation

Collaborative Play

 Players from all the world can join together on quests and adventures or create groups and craft fan fiction together regardless of where they are in the world. Players can form alliances, trade with one another, and compete in competitions and attend events.