Mickey and Friends - A Disney Experience

Jill Shah
Designer & Technologist

Blog

Mickey & Friends- A Disney Experience

With my team at Future Colossal, Camp tasked us to bring their Mickey & Friends experience to life with stunning audio-visuals, physical computing and clever use of custom AV technology. The experience is a fully immersive theatrical experience; a friendly CAMP Counselor leads guests through a world of super-sized puzzles, games, and play spaces celebrating Disney’s Mickey Mouse & Friends! The experience is designed for young families and is particularly engaging to kids between 2 & 8 years.

Client: CAMP

Location: Manhattan, NY

Role: Projection Mapping Artist, Onsite Installation, QA Specialist

Immersive Theatre

Mickey & Friends was a fully immersive theatrical experience which took kids and families to Mickey’s birthday party. Goofy accidentally shrinks everyone in his vicinity and guests go on a journey through rooms filled with giant presents, a massive wall of hot dogs, and larger than life interactive technology. Guests collect hidden microchips throughout the experience in order to unlock the Shrink Ray so they can unshrink themselves just in time for a dance party with Mickey and friends.

The Technology

Innovation in experiences like these goes beyond content design. The project was a careful, integrated network of networked devices, software, content and hardware. Mickey’s cabin had 7 individual screens working perfectly in sync with one other. Throughout various other spaces, hidden magnetic microchips would drop from the ceiling at perfect times, in sync with actors and their performance. As kids navigate these rooms collecting microchips, they interact with Mickey’s friends on large, projection mapped walls and props. The experience culminates in a dance party with them walking through a giant shrink ray into a corner to corner projection mapped room.

An experience controller application allowed Camp to operate the experience seamlessly, the application gave them control over every display, every TV, computer and content display devices from a central location.

“Fair warning: although catered to children, adults will also enjoy this this super-cute, Disney-inspired immersive experience at the Camp store in lower Manhattan.” - Time Out Magazine