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posted by LaminatorX on Monday March 23 2015, @01:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the Magic-Kingdom dept.

An article in this months Wired details how Disney spent $1 Billion developing, testing, and rolling out their Magicband system that started actually rolling out in 2013.

Disney's Magicband system is based on a wristband containing an RFID chip and a 2.4gHz wifi transmitter. To use the system, the guest simply aligns the Mickey head on the wristband with a Mickey head on the receiving antenna. These antenna are dispersed throughout the park; for example: rides, souvenir shops, restaurants, and on-property hotel rooms. Rather than having to pull out a wallet to pay for something, one simply uses the Magicband and, upon a good read of the RFID tag, your associated credit card gets charged accordingly. It is even used by their FastPass system which allows you to schedule getting on rides.

When everything works, the reader flashes green and emits a pleasing tone; if something goes wrong, it glows blue, never red. Red lights are forbidden at Disney, as they imply something bad happened. Nothing bad can happen at Disney World.

In early 2014, "atdisneyagain.com" did an actual dissection of a Magicband to get a look at the components, complete with FCC look ups to see exactly what was going on inside.

[Update: corrected grammar and phrasing.]

 
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  • (Score: 2) by gnuman on Monday March 23 2015, @08:14PM

    by gnuman (5013) on Monday March 23 2015, @08:14PM (#161670)

    When everything works, the reader flashes green and emits a pleasing tone; if something goes wrong, it glows blue, never red. Red lights are forbidden at Disney, as they imply something bad happened. Nothing bad can happen at Disney World.

    And how about color blind? Most commonly, they can't differentiate between red and green. Using blue addresses this problem. Maybe they don't want to cause problems for close to 9% of the population

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Epidemiology [wikipedia.org]

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 23 2015, @11:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 23 2015, @11:46PM (#161749)

    I'm sure they had multiple justifications.
    My guess they picked blue over other colors for the same reason MS went with blue for the screen of death - its been proven to be the most calming of colors.