When the Star Wars hotel was originally announced at the 2017 D23 Expo in Anaheim, California, Disney made it clear that for the first time, fans of a galaxy far, far away could truly become part of the Star Wars story, even role-playing as their own Star Wars characters if they so choose.
The character that guests get the most time with, however, is a droid named D3-O9. D3 is an artificially intelligent character that is accessible in every single guest cabin. Each guest essentially has a personal D3 to share their experiences with, speaking to her as often or as little as they choose. D3 listens, remembers, responds, offers advice, and becomes part of the experience and story alongside the guest.
The ComicBook.com article went on to share that D3’s lead designer, Imagineer Dawson Dill, shared with their writer that:
“So as the events on the Halcyon Starcruiser unfold, those events affect her [D3-09] and how they affect her are made up with the decisions that the guest makes. So from a development perspective, I think it was a fun challenge to bring D3-O9 to life because it was a technology piece. It’s using speech recognition, natural language, understanding, whole bunch of fancy conversational design technology that we’ve been developing.”
This artificial intelligence droid could ultimately shift the Disney Guest experience throughout all of the company’s Parks and Resorts. Imagine, for example, if all Disneyland Resort and Walt Disney World Resort hotels were equipped with a similar feature, or if a system similar to D3-09 could be accessed on one’s smartphone 24/7, getting to know Guests better every time they visit a Disney property.
Dillow continued, sharing that Walt Disney Imagineering is viewing this unique new Star Wars character as a “stepping stone” to integrating AI into the Disney Guest experience over time:
“At the Imagineering R&D group, we’ve been working on this platform and D3-O9 is definitely the first, the limited play test to really put this out there for the first time. But the hope is that this is a platform that we think it can bring a lot of different Disney characters of life in different ways, on different mediums and different platforms. It’s been a long road to get here. We’ve been looking at a lot of this for a while, but this is sort of the first big stepping stone that we’ve put out in the water.”
What do you think about the impact D3-09 could have on Disney Guests in the future?
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