New technologies come with a learning curve and that’s certainly the case for Baymax Dreams: Fred’s Glitch, a new interactive animated short from Disney Television Animation and Disney Media & Entertainment Distribution Technology. Having seen the evolution from the earliest days of virtual reality at Disney Quest to the immersive, multi-sensory experience of The VOID, you can see how far technology has come over the past two decades. In the case of this new endeavor, supported by Disney’s StudioLAB, it’s clear that this new cloud-based interactive streaming technology is still in its infancy.
Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival through their future-looking New Frontier program, Baymax Dreams: Fred’s Glitch is a cross between a kid-friendly smartphone game and an animated short. Light on plot, the premise is that you’re Hiro Hamada, the main character from Disney’s Big Hero 6, and you’re uploading Fred into a virtual world alongside Baymax. A glitch during the upload process causes some hiccups, including the creation of a physical glitch, whom Fred names Gertrude, who gets away from him and wreaks havoc in a digital San Fransokyo.
From the very beginning, participants in the experience are required to take action in order to move things along. From pressing your finger to a scanner to access Hiro’s system to customizing Fred’s outfit colors during the upload process, it’s clear right away that this is not a passive viewing experience. As Gertrude begins to run amok, your finger is the only way to find her amongst the digital noise, trying to suck up the fragments to clean things up and catch the glitch before the city is destroyed.
Unlike a VR experience, you don’t have any say in where the camera looks. Being an action-heavy experience, it becomes quite frenzied and chaotic, at which times I experienced actual glitches beyond the plot-driven ones. While the graphics looked pretty good, the glitches would skip forward in time, sometimes even cutting dialogue short. The entire experience is streamed from a cloud with no downloads required. Even with the fastest internet connection possible in Silicon Valley, it couldn’t keep up with the amount of data being beamed into my iPhone. In that case, perhaps a temporary download requirement would have improved the overall experience.
There are also several limitations to the experience. The content is only viewable from an iPhone or iPad using Safari, meaning it excludes Sundance attendees who use a different type of smart device. On top of that, the content is actually hosted on a game streaming platform called GeForce NOW, which requires users to not only create and authenticate an account, but then take a seemingly unnecessary step of accepting a free membership in order to play it. The servers can only handle so many visitors at a time, so you’re forced into a virtual queue and have to wait your turn. My wait took about 20-minutes to move through 110 people and I was given the option to bypass it if I signed up for a 6-month membership for GeForce NOW, the lowest membership level offered at the time of this review. During the wait, you have to keep your screen active. If your phone goes to sleep, it loses your spot in the queue and you start again at the back of the line.
If Baymax Dreams: Fred’s Glitch taught me anything, it’s that this kind of streaming interactive technology has a long way to go before it can take Disney Quest’s earliest efforts at VR and transform it into something like The VOID. The concept is cool, but in practice it’s no more exciting than a smartphone game that requires a few taps and finger slides. Although I will admit that this type of technology is probably best put to use on content for kids in an era where the constant presence of second screens means storytellers have to compete against a myriad of distractions. That may be fine for the next generation but as for me, I’d rather just watch a short the old-fashioned way.