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Comment by atwebb | Hacker News Reader

It reads kind of like a fluff/marketing piece but I'll be damned if it wasn't pretty seamless. I have no idea what it was like prior to the bands but the whole experience was clearly made a lot easier by them and the accompanying app (which is pretty solid). I needed my phone and my band, that was really it (well,...snacks, water bottles, strollers etc..)

It was 85% well done, when you're actually scanning it can be a bear to get it just right, took a few days to get used to flipping my wrist around awkwardly and had a panic moment when one came off.

2 other things:

1) We didn't experience any of the location oriented deliveries/notifications, maybe they stopped or maybe we aren't special

2) That restaurant is very cool

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The long range reads are primarily used right now to detect that you were on a particular ride when your photo was taken so when you swipe your band they can pull up your photo for purchase. A lot of the other ideas they had for this tech was never brought to fruition because it creeped out a lot of the test guests.

Source: I played a very very small role in making magic bands happen.

Do you mean like the characters greeting kids by name or saying "Happy Birthday!" if that was a known event?

As a techy parent that's one thing that sounded great on paper but I'd be kind of creeped out if I didn't know what was going on.

The greetings seemed to be based off of buttons the kids could wear or if it was marked on a reservation, there was a tick box asking about special events.

On our last visit that had the MagicBands, the reservation step asked for the names of everyone in your family. The bands were personalized with a color of your choice as well as your name laser-engraved on the back. So now Disney has a first and last name to go in the database next to your tag ID.

One of the early ideas being touted by Disney for this technology was the ability for the staff and characters to greet you by name (as read off the MagicBand at a distance) as you approached.

The low-tech birthday buttons are a whole different thing.

Sorry, I mixed up the one you were responding to, I'd guess you're correct as that's what I would've felt was creepy sometimes. My kids got overwhelmed by all the Happy Birthday/special greetings on the first day so it was nice to have a way to "turn it off".

Just a side note to add about scanning the wristband for a ride's fastpass line or entry into a park: it's a two step process where you put a finger on a finger print scanner and then move on to scanning the wristband. If both are successful, you're let in.

Oddly enough, the fidelity of the fingerprint scans wasn't high enough to read 2 of our party's members, so it was an slightly annoying process having to wait for a supervisor to come over and officially clear them.

The process was seemless for the rest of the party (i.e. 10 people).

IIRC, the finger print scan was only for entry into the park, not for Fastpass lines.

I was just there at the end of December, but it is all kind of hazy now.

Disney has been putting biometrics on park tickets for a while now to prevent people from selling their unused admission days on the open market and stop the sharing of annual passes.

>when you're actually scanning it can be a bear to get it just right //

So it uses some sort of direct contact rather than NFC? [Perhaps to make it less easy to clone?]

I can't definitively say that you MUST touch but you have to get very close, if not always touching. It also has to be oriented correctly (mouse ears up), there's not too much wiggle room on any of the readers (turnstile, room, handheld). I did assume it'd be a simple swipe but it's more, touch and hold for a second. Sometimes it's almost instantaneous, sometimes I had to take it off to get it to work right.

I don't see how orientation would matter.

After the first day we realized if we wore the band a certain way then it was easier to flip the wrist to hold for a connection. The shape is kind of weird and hard to understand the proper way to wear it. I could have been wearing the wrong way from what was intended for all I know though.

The direct contact for rides and purchases is there to prevent accidental activation -- you have thousands of people walking around with these bands in close proximity. In contrast, when pulling up to the gate at one of hotels, you just wave your wrist a foot away from the sensor out of your car window and it turns green and opens the gate -- no awkward stretching required.

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