How the design of Disney parks affects our perspective (2020)
disneycicerone.com
disneycicerone.com
In many ways, this kind of design thinking could be useful in designing real-world spaces as well.
They already are used. The difference in urban design, which is what I assume you mean by real-world spaces, is that in theme parks and video games, the designers effectively have complete control over the entire system from top tp bottom and bittom to top. In urban design, that is not the case and one needs to deal with decades and centuries old organic, ad-hoc design and evolution of the urban system.
Like, I get it, but sometimes the suspension of logic can get a bit challenging. :V
Even the “massive” cities of MMORPGs are the size of a small neighborhood.
Some games do a better job by means of a different cheat (though I'm not sure you can even call it that). For instance, making it clear you're only accessing a very small part of the city. PoE2, among others, does a great job of this with a "city map" that shows you moving through many districts before reaching the spot where the story actually takes place. Distances, meanwhile, can be demonstrated by other means. The old Fallouts, for instance, had the in-game date swiftly advance while travelling in the overworld.
The only saving grace is the fire Marshall doesn’t like it so you can follow the fire exit signs to escape.
You probably have the answer there. Even if the real world holds a larger number of interesting things than a game, the distance between the things is so much larger than in games that I have to spend most of the time just navigating between them. In games, I can get from one interesting thing to the next in minutes or seconds.
Here is one of the few remaining traces of this, since they asked for all conference slides to be taken down a few years ago: https://twitter.com/pixelpar/status/1286425979615936513
you don't have to exert any physical effort in a video game. once physical exercise comes into play, the brain calculates an "is this worth it" equation. i'm guessing most decide it's not.
but the rewards for real world exploration aren't explicit. sure, maybe you found a cool mushroom that was fun to look at, but what's it worth? you probably cant go sell it for 2 gold pieces or eat it to gain 5% of your health back.
Game worlds are also usually far more compact and smaller than the real world, even the "big" ones. If it took a couple real-world days to walk to the top of the Throat of the World in Skyrim, while you're combo sweating-freezing in heavy clothes, legs are dead by halfway up, and most of the time nothing's happening and also much of the time you're in clouds obscuring the best views... it'd be a lot less fun. Instead, in the actual game, you can run the "7,000 steps" in what, 15 minutes if you ignore enemies?
It's telling that most of these games have rather high movement speed, and often also some form of teleportation, despite also having the advantages of being tailor-designed to be beautiful and fun and much smaller than real-world equivalents. Skyrim experienced at a realistic walking/hiking pace and without any form of time-skip fast travel would be a lot less fun. Ditto the recent Zelda games. Link basically runs everywhere, even when you're not "sprinting", and can perform incredible and quick feats of climbing to get over or on top of obstacles. Plus the whole paraglider thing. You climb a tall cliff in real life, now you gotta climb back down....
Because if you take an NPCs stuff in real life, it turns out vastly different for you than in the game.
" the distance between the things is so much larger than in games that I have to spend most of the time just navigating between them. In games, I can get from one interesting thing to the next in minutes or seconds."
This isn't quite true. Because there is more detail in real life, the distance between things is shorter than in games. The difference is that games only focus on what most people are interested in, so the distance between those things are smaller. The game is designed to be gratifying, and thus it needs to be near instant. Just like the algorithms feeding us Facebook content, it's designed for your engagement. There are plenty of interesting things in the real world if we are interested in the details.
They talk about using big visible markers (called weenies) for orientation and to help draw players. Having seemingly multiple paths that actually end up in the same destination. Tiny rewards for exploration. Good stuff
Talk: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1305/Everything-I-Learned-Abou... Slides: https://mrbossdesign.blogspot.com/2009/03/everything-i-learn...
Obviously the IP provides a nice jumping-off point, and there are broadly similar themes around building a new reality etc. But it's not intuitively an obvious leap from moviemaking to theme park building.
The idea of theme parks as "real life video games" provides some continuity to that.
The short sight lines help keep everything in view the same theme so you're not jolted out of the "Land" you're in. It also helps keep the park from looking full. A majority of the park's crowd is outside of your line of sight at any given time.
Notice how crowded Main Street or New Orleans Square feels during a show/parade vs five minutes after it's over. You'd think the crowd got bussed out of the park.
It's even cleverer when combined with the forced perspective so the short sight lines never really look short. The forced perspective of nearby buildings tricks you into thinking distant buildings are farther away than they are.
Semi-related: if you go on the Disneyland version of Pirates of the Caribbean, there is a short section of caves right between the first and second drop. The section only lasts maybe 10/15 seconds, but it's where you hear A Pirate's Life for Me for the first time in the entire ride as a kind of foreshadowing of what you will see later. Well, as soon as you go down the second drop, which is not that steep or long, the music is completely gone, and all you can hear is the atmospheric ambient music for the "main" cave section. I always found that incredibly fascinating, since you can turn around and see the previous area, but you cannot hear the music at all.
EDIT: there is actually something that is closer to iMuse, at least the way it was implemented in the Special Edition. Their parade routes are divided into multiple zones, and the soundtrack is equally divided in sections for each float. They use a positioning system to determine where each float is, and feed the correct section of the soundtrack to that speaker zone. It works incredibly well, and you don't notice it at all while you're there.
Listen to the soundtrack for the Paint the Night parade for an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoIpk9F_Okk&pp=ygUhcGFpbnQgd...
Each section is basically the same length, the whole thing is (mostly) in the same exact key, of course it's the same BPM across the board, and each section has an intro/outro that can act as transition points to mix into the next section. They can also, of course, loop ad libitum if the parade were to stop for a few minutes. Really cool stuff!
Every other park is filled with them, so you never lack for something to drink.
I’m still not sure whether I’m impressed or annoyed.
Every option was a tens of minutes wait behind people ordering food.
I did eventually find a cart selling, also inexplicably, only pre-packaged frozen slush type treats. Serviceable enough for my thirst. Yet, still, for no discernible reason, the very short line took tens of minutes.
I had a pretty lousy time despite it being one of my favorite places on earth. It was hours of waiting and being thirsty for a grand total of four rides only to see all the queues shut down an hour before close.
They could do much better.
https://disneylandcats.com/about/?amp=1
Disney, though apparently a front for Big Mouse, employed feral cats to destroy mousekind.
There is no such thing as 'our' perspective any more than there is an 'our' laws of physics. Perspective is immutable. The perspective of now will be the same for everyone in one million years time.
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/abnormal-perception-of-siz...
> In summary, a 22 year old Mbuti man named Kenge accompanied Turnbull on a drive to the mountains. Kenge had supposedly never left the Ituri forest before. On seeing some buffalo in the distance, he mistook them for insects. As the car approached and their apparent size increased, Kenge became confused as to how they transformed into buffalo. He made the same mistake with a boat at some distance on a lake, thinking it was a small piece of wood.
> Turnbull’s explanation was that, having spent his life in the forest, Kenge had not been exposed to large vistas and so had never acquired the ability to adjust his percpetion of size for distant objects. This explanation seems to be accepted without question; I’ve read it in a psychology textbook and, I think, in one of Oliver Sacks’ books.
However, perspective is a different issue. Specifically, it is a mathematical model for projecting 3D space onto a 2D plane.
This seems like a quible, but as someone who teaches perspective, I have a lot of trouble with people coming to my class with a misunderstanding of what it is. 3 point perspective is not the only spatial system out there, but it is the one that has had most impact upon European art, and it is also the most exact. It has not changed a bit since it was invented by Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham 1,000 years ago, and it is likely not to have changed even when we all have devolved into radioactive lizard rats in 1,000,000 years time.
Isn’t that what the 3 point perspective in art trying to simulate?
While most people would map the art to their real world experience or in the article the Disney buildings, the guy who has lived in the forest I assume wouldn’t have been fooled.
Yes I’m self aware enough to know that my opinions come from one semester in art class over 25 years ago.
I see your point.
As a painter, physiology and perception play as significant role in my treatment of space as perspective. My original quibble was that these terms are being confused with each other.
We infer space from many cues. When I paint a pastoral landscape (e.g. trees on a hill) I create depth by employing a whole lot of spatial devices. Most significantly by considering the depth planes (foreground, middle ground etc) and their relative differences. These differences can be of average lightness, local contrast (i.e. dynamic range), edge sharpness (distant objects tend to be more fuzzy), hue (distant objects tend to be more blue) etc etc.
None of these have anything to do with perspective. However, the moment I paint a building, it is 90% an issue of perspective. Perspective is a device for projecting cubes onto a picture plane. The 3 points of 3 point perspective relate to the three visible sides of the cube. It is a mechanical process entirely within the domain of physics. This is why Ibn al-Haytham's treatise on optics simultaneously addressed perspective.
> Yes I’m self aware enough to know that my opinions come from one semester in art class over 25 years ago.
Its seems that it was a fruitful semester. :)
As well as "perspective" as in linear perspective, the word can also mean something like a way of considering or understanding something [1]. I suspect the article's title may be a play on these complementary meanings.
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/perspect...
https://www.yachtingmonthly.com/sailing-skills/how-to-judge-...
With experience a lot of this can be internalized and an "old salt" would have the information seemingly without additional concentration.
There is just one shared perspective from any particular place but only some of them provide the illusion.
There is quite a bit of pain from simply moving your body long distances. The reward must make up for this.
Beautiful views are the least rewarding part, those moments are fleeting, and there are plenty of more beautiful things you can see on your phone without leaving your bed. This is basically the goal of Disney, throw in some short physical hedonism from rides, and that is the experience. Only thing I'm missing is that having your own children smile will cause some intense pleasure thanks to biology.
However, call me a Platonist, but the best part of traveling is the knowledge. I remember physically feeling awful during my travels in Europe. The transportation was long, the food was so small portions I felt ill (until I learned you could get tuna sandwiches everywhere[Weight lifter walking 12+ hrs/day]), and outside the Sistine chapel, I had seen these views before. However looking back on it, and my favorite moments was learning about the history and learning about the area. Being physically able to walk from Aurelian walls to the colosseum and the forum was enlightening. A history book couldn't teach me this.
Traveling physically hurts, but it doesn't mean it wont be looked back fondly.
I'm curious why you consider going to Disney faux-traveling. It's an opinion I hear often (and I once held) but everybody seems to get there for different reasons.
For what it's worth, I don't think your experience is universal. Fair enough, walking around all day does create some bodily discomfort, but personally I walk around in my home city a lot. So I'm pretty used to that and the discomfort is generally minor.
But in particular, you seem to not have a particularly good time with the food while travelling, which for me is often the best part of traveling while there, and the most memorable after the fact. In some ways, I travel to eat, and maybe that's a common alternative to your experience, to be fair, I think I'd like traveling far less if the food was generally bad.
And "thousands of dollars for a multi-week holiday in hell"? That's a lot of exaggeration in little space, the kind of hyperbole the Imagineers at Disney would create.
While, it will probably be a few thousand dollars depending on accomodation, travel, and the like, that's true of a lot of travel.
Multi-week? C'mon, Disney itself offers multi-day packages. Hell, on their site, you can only select up to 5 days worth of tickets. So on the outside, it's a week. And if you don't want to visit certain parks, you can probably do it in 2 to 4 days. Last time I went, we split time between Disneyworld and Universal and only stayed about a week.
As to hell, there is one thing I really appreciate about Disney and it's their absolute commitment to the bit and the buy-in they get from their employees. The dedication to the guest "experience" is nothing short of amazing. I also find it very honest in its way. They make no bones about this being performance first. The person serving pretzels, their job isn't serving pretzels, their job is to play the part of someone who lives to serve pretzels. It's fake, but it's honest about it. I don't think less of movies simply because they contain fantastic elements. We both know what I signed up for when I buy a ticket to see Transformers. Similarly, when you buy a ticket to Disneyworld, you both know what you're signing up for.