Tuesday, March 30, 2010

5 Ways Disney’s New Cruise Ship Will be Wired for Family Fun Read More http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/03/disney-dream/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_m


Virtual Portholes: It’s a fact of ship design that some staterooms will be “interior” staterooms, meaning they don’t share a wall with the outside hull of the ship, and therefore don’t have win- err, portholes. But the interior staterooms on the Dream will. Each stateroom will have a 30″ round HD screen mounted on one wall, feeding live video from a series of cameras mounted around the perimeter of the boat. No matter what direction the Dream is sailing, or what time of day, passengers will see what’s visible outside in the specific direction they are facing in the stateroom, as if they were looking at an actual porthole. And to add to the Disney magic, each screen will have random characters from Disney properties matted into the video feed doing appropriate things: the house from Up! floating by, or a starfish from Finding Nemo holding on to wave hello. Disney reps say that many people, when offered an upgrade to rooms with actual portholes, decline in favor of the virtual ones.