Disney: The Castle

Immersive

9 Feb

Written By Mesmer

We worked with Disney Concerts and Balich Wonder Studio to create Disney: The Castle, an immersive festival experience over five classic Disney worlds, for the Riyadh Season 2023.

As well as overall technical specification and supervision of the site-wide video systems, Mesmer created three unique immersive environments for the project. All content design, character design, software development and animation was undertaken by the Mesmer team, working closely with Disney Concerts and the various third-party vendors supplying the other stages. Mesmer also provided the specialist media servers required for the interactive sections of the show.

In Aladdin, audiences had the chance to meet the Genie - a 7m tall interactive living character, puppeted by a live actor. The system that ran the genie a development of our previous living character work on Guardians of the Galaxy and Manchester International Festival. A combination of face-tracking, volumetric body capture and mocap gloves was used to fully control an Unreal Engine videogame character in such a way that actors could be swapped out with only a minute's changeover, allowing the event to run all day.

In Frozen, audiences found themselves in an interactive forest where they could chase magic around the room, reveal ice sculptures in the floor, or interact with the four elements, powered by Lidar trackers in Notch.

In Encanto, guests were treated to two live shows - a projection mapping extravaganza on the faces of the iconic Casa Madrigal and a live musical performance with guest appearances by characters in the windows of the house.