Disney’s new Imagineering app gives you the power to test their latest in-park technology

Disney is inviting theme park guests into the Imagineering testing process with a new app called Disney Imagineering Labs. We got an early hands-on look at two of its first experiments: an interactive Star Wars adventure in Galaxy’s Edge and an AI-powered Disneyland guide that knows more than you might expect.

A new app called Disney Imagineering Labs will let park guests test out new games and other apps the Imagineering team is developing, to help guide them to possibly becoming full experiences themselves. We were among a select few who were able to test out a new interactive Star Wars game in Galaxy’s Edge, and a new AI tool that can answer all of your park questions. 

‘Secrets of the Spire’ experiment will launch Nov. 10, followed by the Disneyland Enchanted Guide experiment coming soon, both with special early access for Magic Key Holders at Disneyland Resort.

Key points

• Disney Imagineering Labs is a new Disneyland app that lets certain guests test experimental games and technology before they become finished experiences.
• Star Wars: Secrets of the Spire brings an interactive augmented reality adventure to Galaxy’s Edge, with missions involving Princess Leia and the Empire.
• Disneyland Enchanted Guide uses AI to answer park questions, provide directions and monitor attraction wait times. The app launches first for Magic Key holders ages 13 and older.

Inside Disney’s new Imagineering Labs app

Disney invited us to Disneyland to meet with one of the leads for interactive experience development at Walt Disney Imagineering, who also works across the Lucasfilm portfolio. Asa Kalama, executive, Creative & Interactive Experiences, Walt Disney Imagineering and his team walked our small group through the new app before we went full hands-on with it.

Imagineering’s research and development lab works this way internally all the time: build something raw, test it, then refine it. But guests have rarely, if ever, gotten to see that stage before. Now we will. 

What is this app, exactly?

The “test” lab provides a variety of “experiments.” Each one gets an info card before you start: a short description of what you’re about to do, and the specific features Imagineering is trying to learn about — in the first experiment’s case, augmented reality storytelling.

Then comes the part I have never seen Disney do. Every experiment carries a status, and the status is basically a warning label about how finished it is:

At the end of every experiment, you’re asked for feedback. Disney says it wants the technical complaints, yes, but what they really want to know is: does this kind of experience resonate? Is it interesting? Based on the answers, an experiment can get more iterations inside the app, graduate into something real, or get unceremoniously retired.

The experiments in the app are meant to change. An experiment might get all the data it needs in its first month and vanish while Imagineering spends six months rebuilding it. Or it may live in the app for a year, getting small improvements the whole time. Or it may go away altogether.

Disney says there will be notifications when new experiments arrive or change, but there is no promise that the thing you loved on Friday will still be there on your next trip.

The launch lineup we tested had two experiments, and they could not be more different. The first is entertainment. The second is utility. We started with the fun one.

First experiment: Star Wars, Secrets of the Spire

Secrets of the Spire is set in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. Your phone becomes sort of your binoculars, or Macrobinoculars, as they’re called in Star Wars lore. You hold your phone up, look through it as you journey through Black Spire Outpost, and you can scan and see through certain items in the land utilizing augmented reality (AR).

Princess Leia walks you through the story. Encrypted Imperial signals, she says, are hidden across the outpost – signals tied to the coordinates of an Imperial starpath unit the Empire didn’t lose, exactly. It buried the coordinates on purpose, in pieces, so they could be recovered later. They need your help to go recover them, while other parties (the Empire) search for the same thing. No pressure.

How the Star Wars hacking game works

The gameplay is pretty simple: follow the tracker to a signal (my phone buzzed more as I got closer, which is a nice, heads-up touch), raise the phone, scan the area until the signal reveals itself, then “slice” it – Star Wars for hacking – to pull the next piece of the coordinates.

Repeat across the outpost until all of the coordinates are found. The slicing involves moving your phone around to grab the white packets of data coming at you, while avoiding the red ones.

Something you may not expect: distance matters. My first couple of slices were a bit harder to complete because I hadn’t found the sweet spot — how far to stand from the thing you’re scanning, and once I figured that out, it got easier.

Once you successfully beat each level, it triggers some sort of sound or lights in the land, like robots beeping for all to hear who happen to be passing by. 

You don’t have to finish it in one go. Close the app, go ride something, come back; it saves your place, even on a different day. I didn’t see it in my test, but Imagineering hopes to add little hidden Easter eggs tucked into the AR view. They said there’s a lot of lore packed into Galaxy’s Edge that you walk straight past. This is a way to surface it without.

There’s a choice at the end of this first chapter. An Imperial officer who has been monitoring your work makes you an offer — transmit what you found to the Empire, and be compensated. Or get the coordinates to the Millennium Falcon and help the Rebellion.

Even though what I played is just a first chapter, not a full mission. It’s possible the full mission may never come. Imagineering doesn’t want to build an entire AR saga and then find out guests don’t like holding a phone up, or the gameplay, or the storyline.

Is this just the Play Disney Parks app again?

Since the Play Disney Parks app was deprecated and some of this is similar to the “hacking” guests could do in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, yes, this part of the new app essentially replaces that. But this time you’re playing with the legacy Star Wars characters like Princess Leia, in conjunction with the new storyline of Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland. If the app ever comes to Disney World’s Galaxy’s Edge, it would have to fit the First Order storyline of the land. 

The Labs app is aiming wider and bigger. The underlying framework allows technology Play Disney couldn’t do, starting with AR. This is also built in close partnership with the Disney Experiences Technology team — the people who build the destination apps — for a specific reason: the best experiments are meant to graduate.

If something proves itself in Labs, the goal is for it to find a home either in the Disneyland app or its own app, where everybody gets it in its polished form.

Second experiment: Disneyland Enchanted Guide

The second lab experiment we tested is the opposite of play: it’s all business and answers.

The Disneyland Enchanted Guide is a push-to-talk guide (you can also type instead) built with the goal of letting guests be more present in the parks, not to be standing in Frontierland digging through an app’s menus.

So instead of learning how the Disneyland app is organized, you just ask, out loud, like you’d ask a cast member, and it surfaces the answer using AI.

Yes, you can already do this with other AI apps like ChatGPT, Grok, Meta, etc. But this AI takes all its information directly from Disney. With other AI apps, there’s a chance the information it gives you is wrong. 

Can it actually answer faster than I can search?

In my test? Mostly, yes – and I tried to break it. That’s literally what they asked us to do: go off the rails, ask it whatever you’d actually ask.

Here are some of the questions I asked and the answers given:

• “Where can I build a lightsaber?” 

Answer: Savi’s Workshop, right nearby in Galaxy’s Edge at $249.99 plus tax, reservation required. It even mentioned the complimentary Youngling saber-building experience running walk-up that morning, and was clear that one doesn’t include a lightsaber to take home. Good save, because that follow-up question was coming.

• “Is there anywhere I can still get breakfast?”

Answer: Jolly Holiday, Plaza Inn’s character breakfast and Carnation Café — all open at the moment. 

Trying to trick Disneyland’s AI

My favorite test, though, was the trap: “How do I get to California Screamin’ from here?” California Screamin’ hasn’t existed under that name since 2018. The guide didn’t miss a beat. It answered, “That’s now the Incredicoaster on Pixar Pier at Disney California Adventure; you’ll need a Park Hopper or eligible Magic Key. Here’s the roughly 20-minute walk across the Esplanade, and the wait is about 10 minutes right now.”

It knew the ride, knew the old name, and knew the new name. If you know how many AI assistants confidently give directions to rides that closed years ago, you understand why I was impressed.

I also tried to trip it up by asking something I know many guests get confused about, where can I find the Harry Potter castle? It told me it can only help with questions about Disneyland. 

It also knows where you are. It can give you directions from where you are to where you want to go. And there’s a camera button that was smarter than I expected. I pointed it at the petrified tree in Frontierland and it correctly identified it.

I asked it about a sign for the Rainbow Ridge post office and asked if it’s a real post office. It correctly told me it’s a themed detail from the old mining town that inspired Big Thunder — not a working post office.

Disneyland’s AI guide can track wait times and remember your questions

One of the best features of the guide is the ability to watch a wait time for you. You can ask it to notify you when a certain attraction’s wait time drops below whatever amount you’d like. For example, just say, “Tell me when the wait time for the Winnie the Pooh ride drops below 20 minutes.”

That’s the kind of thing you may use every single trip and then wonder how you lived without it.

Another great feature is that it remembers context. If you ask about appropriate rides for your 3-year-old, then later ask about a thrill ride, it will remind you that thrill rides aren’t appropriate for 3-year-olds.

For now, the guide doesn’t currently know you. It can’t look at your account and tell you how many Lightning Lanes you have left, but that feature may be added if and when this leaves the lab app and is added to the My Disney Experience app.

Then they handed us the glasses

The last part of the test is where this stops being an app and starts being something that keeps you even more in the moment and not looking at a screen.

The Enchanted Guide can pair with wearable devices you bring with you – Meta glasses, earbuds, that sort of thing – over Bluetooth. No phone out of your pocket once it’s set up.

Ask where you can get a cheeseburger. If you’re wearing Meta glasses, or another device with a camera, you can even ask about what you’re looking at. It can even act on those wait-time alerts while you just walk around with your family like a person, instead of a person holding a phone to their face. 

Who is the Labs app actually for?

If you’re a fan who is in the parks all the time, likes being a guinea pig, and has opinions (who doesn’t?), this is for you, and honestly, you’re who it’s for first anyway (Magic Key holders). Download it when it launches, play the experiments while they exist, and file the feedback. Your complaints and your praise are, for once, the actual product.

If you’re a Star Wars fan, Secrets of the Spire alone is worth the download — with the warning that you’re playing a first chapter of something, and the chapter is really a question: do you like storytelling this way? Answer honestly. The rest of the story depends on it.

If you visit Disneyland once every few years and just want your day handled, keep your eyes on the current Disneyland app instead. Nothing in Labs replaces it yet, and the guide’s gaps mean you’d have to rely on the current app anyway.

The future of Disney Imagineering is partly up to you

Disney Imagineers build these incredible, finished worlds, and historically, guesses at what we’d want inside them. This time they’re asking first — while there’s still time to change the answer.

Disney Imagineering Labs gives Disneyland guests a rare opportunity to test new technology while it’s still being developed, from an interactive Star Wars adventure to an AI-powered park guide. Neither experience is a finished product, but guest feedback could help determine which features eventually become part of a future Disneyland visit.

Just, please, don’t sell the coordinates to the Empire. The pay is good, the benefits are terrible, and someone in our group already tried it. It may or may not have been me … watch our video! (Hey, Leia called me a Nurf Hurder and it made me mad.)