For quite a while now I've been working on a "Disney's Biggest Theme Park Mistakes" column for LaughingPlace, and with any luck I'll finish it in the next week or so. One item on my list was bugging me, however: it wasn't so much a "mistake" as simply a "huh?", and it has to do with that cool, free-roaming ride vehicle technology that's used over in Tokyo's Aquatopia and Winnie the Pooh rides. Why haven't we seen this ride technology appear anywhere outside of Tokyo? I know it's supposed to be expensive, but Disney's built a lot of expensive attractions since this technology first appeared and none of them are using it. No announced ride uses it*. There aren't even any rumors of rides using it. How come?
To be sure, this technology is not the end-all, be-all that it's sometimes made out to be. The most tantalizing myth swirling around it is that you could take riders on completely different paths each time through an attraction, providing an element of surprise and adding to the repeatability of the ride. Economically, however, it's hard to imagine how that would work: you're telling me that you're going to build a huge attraction with, say, three different paths through it…and you're only going to show 33% of the attraction to someone who's spent an hour waiting in line to see it, with full knowledge that most people don't ride an attraction more than once during a visit? The economics of E-Ticket attractions just don't support not showing you everything during each ride-through. The only time you can afford to do something like this is during a C-ticket attraction like Aquatopia, where the ride itself is the experience, not the ride's environment or visuals.
Here we have an amazing technology that contributes more to the experience of–and is economically more feasible to use in–a C-ticket attraction than an "E". And yet C-tickets, almost by definition, can't afford to employ this technology. As a result, it sits in limbo. Will we ever see it used again? I'm sure we will, as the economics of the technology shift and as Imagineering is given more time to think up clever ways to use it. I hope they do figure it out…because it is pretty darn cool.
* Based on concept drawings and descriptions, it seems plausible that the under-development Toy Story Mania ride employs this technology. Some signs are there: there are two different paths that riders go on, and the renderings indicate little if no "track" system in place. But Disney is always so aggressive in touting how technologically advanced they are that the fact that "free-roaming" technology hasn't been mentioned in descriptions of the ride to me indicates that it's probably not being used.