Innoventions (Disneyland)
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| Entrance to Innoventions | |||||||
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| Land | Tomorrowland | ||||||
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| Attraction type | Interactive Exhibits | ||||||
| Soft opening date | July 3, 1998 | ||||||
| Opening date | November 10, 1998 | ||||||
| Hosted by | Tom Morrow (Nathan Lane) (former) Audrey Wasilewski (current)[1] |
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| Music | Sherman Brothers | ||||||
| Audio-animatronics | 1 | ||||||
| Ring show | Honda (Transportation) Yamaha (Sports) Taylor Morrison (Home) Southern California Edison (Information) ABC Broadcasting (Entertainment) |
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| Previous attractions | Carousel of Progress (1967-1973) America Sings (1974-1988) |
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Innoventions is an attraction in Tomorrowland at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. It opened on July 3, 1998 as part of the New Tomorrowland, and focuses on near-futuristic technologies. It occupies the Carousel Theater, a round two-story building in which the outer half of the first floor rotates. A similar attraction of the same name exists in Epcot at the Walt Disney World Resort.
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[edit] History
From 1967 to 1973, the building hosted the Carousel of Progress. This attraction was moved from Disneyland to its current location in Magic Kingdom at the Walt Disney World Resort in 1973, at the request of its sponsor, GE. America Sings occupied the building from the following year until 1988. Audio-Animatronics from the show were used in Disneyland's Splash Mountain. The building was unused until Innoventions opened ten years later.
[edit] Attraction
The first floor currently hosts the Dream Home in alliance with Microsoft, HP, and Taylor Morrison.[2] Keeping with Walt Disney's vision of bringing cutting-edge, inspiring ideas to Tomorrowland, the Innoventions Dream Home introduces Disneyland guests to newly available technology from the participating companies that will enhance their lives today, while providing them a glimpse of the emerging digital advances they may find in their homes in the future. The attraction provides guests with a "high-tech, high-touch" opportunity to experience technology in an entertaining, low-risk environment showing them how the power of technology can connect them to the people and things they care most about.
The technology companies showcase a wide range of technologies and products in the exhibit, including the latest in PCs, digital music and gaming. The Innoventions Dream Home demonstrates how home technology can be simple, intuitive and fun while helping guests understand how to seamlessly interconnect their home, the surrounding community and the world, helping consumers stay closer to the people, places and entertainment that are most important to them. The alliances also help ensure that the Innoventions Dream Home remains on the forefront of technology with the newest devices and products as part of the exhibit.
Guests actively engage in this experience as the fictional Elias family hosts an open house to show off their new technology. Elias family members rotate throughout the house, randomly interacting with guests in the various rooms. Upon exiting the house, guests can learn more about the companies that collaborated to create the Innoventions Dream Home, exploring the technologies for themselves first-hand.[3]
Guest who enter the Innoventions building are greeted by Tom Morrow, an Audio-Animatronic, who is the fictional mayor of Tomorrowland. He explains Innoventions in a comedic style and performs an updated version of the Sherman Brothers song "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow" from the original Carousel of Progress. He is voiced by Nathan Lane.
[edit] Current exhibits
- 2000–present: St. Joseph Hospital's Healthy University, where guests visit different stations themed as part of a school that promotes healthy living. Guests can calculate their BMI, learn about exercise on a stationary bike, play virtual sports games, and have a chance to see themselves 50 years in the future.
- 2005–present: Honda ASIMO theater, a 15-minute presentation on the state-of-the-art ASIMO robot
- 2007–present: Siemens AG Project Tomorrow, featuring some of the same games as its counterpart at Spaceship Earth (Epcot). Currently, Project Tomorrow features:
- Power City, a large digital "shuffleboard-style" game that has guests push "power pucks" into targets to provide energy to neighborhoods and create the largest city possible. The more neighborhoods that are powered, the higher the city's population becomes. The largest city attainable is Tokyo, which requires the population to reach 10 million.
- Body Builder, a 3-D game allowing guests to build a digital human body. It features the voice of Wallace Shawn as "Dr. Bones."
- Super Driver, a driving simulation video game featuring vehicle accident and avoidance systems.
- A large glass globe with digitally projected images coming from within it. Below it are consoles that take photographs of guests, ask a series of questions about each guest, and superimpose the automatically cropped images of their faces onto an animated vision of the future. These consoles utilize the same system as the one used during the descent of Spaceship Earth
- 2008–present: Taylor Morrison / Microsoft Innoventions Dream Home (sponsored by HP, Microsoft, and Taylor Morrison), a house filled with the latest technology that is either on the market or soon to be available. The house is inhabited by the fictional Elias family, which is hosting an open house to show off their newly acquired technology. Gadgets include
- Eight Microsoft Surface tables, four of which are connected in a single dining room table
- A 100-inch, 1080p rear-projector screen
- Control4 panels in every room connecting to photo frames, lights, window shades, and speakers (previously Life|ware)
- A "Magic Mirror" that places virtual three-dimensional pieces of clothing on a body-mapped subject
- A bedroom that comes to life with the story of Peter Pan
- A touchscreen coffee table containing an interactive original copy of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures Under Ground
- A kitchen featuring a countertop voice-activated cookbook, an internet-connected bulletin board, and Siemens appliances, including the Liftmatic Oven
- Rock Band and video games in the party tent
- 2008–present: The Neighborhood at Innoventions, where guests watch and sometimes participate in live shows about Taylor Morrison homes, Yamaha musical instruments, ABC multi-format programming (in the form of a trivia game show), Honda, or Southern California Edison, depending on which of the five zones into which they enter.
[edit] Gallery
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Innoventions
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Queuing area
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Pre-show area
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Tom Morrow
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Kitchen of Tomorrow
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One of the bedrooms
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Office of Tomorrow
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The Air Scooter
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The technology tree
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XBOX Row
[edit] Former exhibits and sponsors
- 1998-2000 - Honeywell sponsored playground
- 1998-2004 - General Motors simulator attraction
- 1998-2007 - Hewlett Packard-sponsored (formerly Compaq) free computer game arcade
- 2000-2007 - AT&T- Hyperlink Hopscotch, previously an interactive cartoon show.
- 2004-2005, 2007-2008 - Segway track, where guests 16 and older could ride a Segway
- 2005-2007 - VMK Central (closed on June 3, 2007, scheduled to be a limited time only )
- 2000-2007 - Pioneer "Virtual Resort", guests experience a virtual reality vacation
- 2005-2009 - Talk to Stitch, an interactive experience in which guests could talk to Stitch from the movie Lilo and Stitch using technology similar to that of Turtle Talk with Crush at Disney California Adventure Park
[edit] References
[edit] External links
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