![]() “But the goal was to buy our way into the future, to learn about VR 10-plus years before everyone else.” “We knew the equipment was too expensive to be practical,” says one former employee who asked not to be named because their current employer hasn’t permitted them to do interviews, though they are no longer at Disney. “Since Disney was willing to apply the resources to buy the very best supercomputers to run and to build, internally, the very best head-mounted display for comfort it seemed like it was a very unique place to actually explore this space that was otherwise not something you could do at home.”ĭisneyQuest was about more than just virtual reality, but for many who worked there, it presented an opportunity to work on these projects that felt ahead of their time. “At the time it was very expensive to do virtual reality anything,” says former designer Aaron Pulkka. The headsets were so heavy they had to be suspended from the ceiling, and the high-end Silicon Graphics computers used for the software quickly raised the costs. These were elaborate experiments, with hardware costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and headsets referred to internally as “gator vision,” due to the front sticking out like an alligator’s head. Other attractions - like the cars - weren’t strictly VR, but many dabbled in augmented reality. ![]() With Ride the Comix, players lived out what it would be like to jump into a superhero comic book. ![]() With Aladdin’s Magic Carpet Ride, players zoomed down a virtual recreation of Agrabah’s streets. The five-story, 100,000-square-foot space at Walt Disney World housed an arcade and remote-controlled cars, but it also contained some of Disney’s earliest work in virtual reality. ![]() In 1998, Disney launched the original DisneyQuest. ![]()
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