- Disney’s new AI guide could make navigating Disneyland easier
- Works with Ray-Ban Metas, AirPods, and your iPhone
- Coming soon in beta for Magic Key holders through Imagineering Labs
When you’re at a Disney park, or really any theme park, the idea is to be immersed in the experience, right? But there’s also no sugarcoating the fact that a phone, especially one equipped with the Disneyland app, My Disney Experience for Walt Disney World, or any other park app, is pretty essential for planning and making the most of your day.
The app is essentially the brain of your visit, letting you check wait times for attractions, meet-and-greets, and other experiences, but also helping you find your way to food — I mean, we’re all after a corn dog or a churro, right? — other services, and entertainment. But as we’ve heard from Disney Parks leaders in the past, constantly looking down at your phone can break the immersion.
Now, we’re getting a glimpse at a potential alternative, and it’s coming soon for a select group of Disneyland guests through a new Disney Imagineering app that’s set to offer a rare peek behind the curtain.
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Dubbed Imagineering Labs, the opt-in experience won’t replace the main Disneyland app, but it will give guests the chance to try select experiences before they’re fully developed or even guaranteed to launch. It’s a pretty exciting approach, especially since feedback from guests could help shape what Imagineers ultimately bring to life.
The first experiment is an augmented reality Star Wars adventure called Secrets of the Spire, which is decidedly entertainment-focused and uses your iPhone’s camera to overlay digital elements onto the environment and trigger physical reactions throughout Galaxy’s Edge.
But the Disneyland Enchanted Guide is a bit more utility-focused, and it’s seriously piquing my interest. It’s an AI-powered assistant that lets you ask questions in natural language, like, ‘Where’s the nearest Dole Whip?’ ‘How long is the wait for Rise of the Resistance right now?’ or whether you should come back later if the line is too long. It’s also multimodal, meaning you can point your phone’s camera at something in the park and ask about it.
Asa Kalama, Vice President and Executive Creative Director at Walt Disney Imagineering, described the thinking behind it to TechRadar: “Some of us are lucky enough to have that, you know, big Disney Parks fan as a friend, and there’s no better park-going adventure than alongside them. They know all the tips, they know all the tricks, they can help you navigate your day. Well, what if we were able to provide that to every single guest that came to the park?”
And that’s really the idea here. Rather than digging through menus or bouncing between different parts of an app, you can simply ask the Enchanted Guide and get an answer.
The interface is pretty neat, too. Rather than a traditional chatbot screen, the Enchanted Guide puts a familiar Disneyland map front and center, complete with attraction wait times and a glowing Mickey-shaped button at the bottom for asking questions. There are also buttons to type or use your camera, and the Guide can take into account your location, plans, and details you choose to share to make its recommendations more useful throughout the day.
It’s using a combination of AI models to power the intelligence behind the Enchanted Guide, but there’s been a whole host of customizations to make it feel uniquely Disney. Kalama explained that the team has worked to ensure the information comes from Disney’s trusted sources, including real-time park information, and is delivered in a way that feels like the Disney voice, both literally and figuratively. From the pre-recorded preview I saw, it almost feels like chatting with a Cast Member you might stop on Main Street.
It gets even more interesting, though, when you can use another device to interact with it.
You might recall that at Meta Connect 2025, Disney Imagineering showed off an early tease of an experience at Disneyland using Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, letting guests look at their surroundings, ask questions, and hear responses through the glasses. And while that was just an early glimpse, the Disneyland Enchanted Guide is bringing that idea to life, letting you interact with Disney’s new AI assistant without constantly reaching for your phone.
Essentially, you can connect the Disneyland Enchanted Guide within the Imagineering Labs app to compatible Meta smart glasses using Meta’s Wearables Device Access Toolkit. Once that’s enabled and you’re rocking the shades, you can chat with the Guide through the glasses without necessarily needing to pull out your connected phone.
The Enchanted Guide can make use of the glasses’ microphones, speakers, and cameras. That means you could look at an attraction, ask about it, and get real-time information without even knowing its name.
Speaking with TechRadar, Chris Barbour, Director, Content & Ecosystem, Meta, explained that the partnership with Disney Imagineering started with a pretty simple idea: “The best of keep me immersed, keep me not having to look down at my phone, but also give me all the advantages of the technology being present for me.”
As Chris explained, one of his favorite parts is “being able to look at an attraction and get real-time information about that,” with the Guide using what the camera sees to understand what you’re asking about.
On paper, and without having tested it yet, that could be incredibly handy within the park.
For instance, Asa shared a few examples, from checking the current wait time for an attraction to something a little more useful, like getting an alert when that wait drops below a certain threshold.
“Can you let me know when Dumbo the Flying Elephant has a wait time of under 10 minutes?”
The Enchanted Guide could then deliver a notification when that condition is met, leaving you free to enjoy other parts of the park in the meantime.
Imagine if it could also remind you when your next Lightning Lane reservation is coming up or if a slot opens for an attraction you want to experience. That’s the kind of functionality I’d love to see. While Asa didn’t confirm either capability, he did note that some features, including actually making Lightning Lane reservations, still live within the core Disneyland app. For now, the Enchanted Guide can explain how Lightning Lanes work, but will send you over to the main app when it’s time to book one.
“There are certain capabilities that are on our roadmap that aren’t yet currently implemented,” Kalama explained.
And while the Meta Ray-Ban integration is especially interesting, you don’t necessarily need smart glasses to go hands-free with the Enchanted Guide. Bluetooth earbuds, including Apple‘s AirPods, will also work, letting you keep your iPhone tucked away while exploring Disneyland. AirPods won’t support multi-modal on their own, as they don’t have cameras … yet.
Of course, wearing camera-equipped smart glasses in the parks could raise some privacy concerns. Meta Ray-Ban glasses have a built-in capture LED that indicates when the camera is in use, but that might not be immediately obvious to everyone around you. Guests are already accustomed to seeing phones and earbuds throughout the parks, so just be prepared for some looks.
There will even be a dedicated wake word for the Enchanted Guide, though it’s still being finalized ahead of launch. That means you won’t need to pull out your phone and tap the Mickey-shaped microphone button every time you want to ask a question. I’m especially curious to see what Disney lands on for the wake word.
And given that this is an AI assistant capable of understanding images and voice prompts, privacy is another important consideration. Both prompts and images are processed and then deleted, and the Enchanted Guide doesn’t support video. So while it can use a camera to understand what you’re looking at, it isn’t designed to continuously analyze a live video feed.
Of course, this is still an experiment, and there’s plenty we don’t know about how well it will all work. I’m especially curious to see how quickly the Enchanted Guide responds, how accurately it understands what’s happening around you, and whether it really can make navigating Disneyland easier.
And we’ll have to wait a little longer to find out.
The Disneyland Enchanted Guide is still listed as coming soon within Imagineering Labs, and when it does launch, it’ll initially be limited to Disneyland Magic Key holders. The experience will live within the Imagineering Labs app, where you’ll sign in with your Disney account. With an eligible Magic Key linked to your profile, you’ll be able to access the Guide once it’s available for testing.
There will likely be some bugs, hiccups, or slowdowns along the way, but that’s part of the whole Imagineering Labs approach. Rather than waiting until an experience is completely finished, Disney is opening up the development process and letting guests help shape what comes next.
A wider rollout is planned, though there’s no firm date just yet, and for now, this is very much a Disneyland-focused experience.
But the goal behind it all is one that I think makes a lot of sense.
As Kalama put it, “The goal here really is to keep you invested and engaged with the physical world around you and the friends and family that you’ve brought to the park, to get you out of your device and back to your vacation as quickly as possible.”
And that’s what has me excited about the Disneyland Enchanted Guide. Disney isn’t trying to replace the magic of being in the parks with another screen or another digital experience. Instead, it’s exploring how technology can help you make the most of your day without constantly having to reach for your smartphone.
There’s still plenty to prove, especially when it comes to how well the AI works in a busy, sometimes unpredictable theme park environment. But if Disney can pull this off, the Enchanted Guide could become the kind of park companion you don’t realize you need until you’ve spent a day with it.
And if it means more time enjoying Disneyland and less time staring at my iPhone, I’m all for it.
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jacob.krol@futurenet.com (Jacob Krol)
