Dine at a table that moves you from room to room? A look at the future of theme parks
The theme park industry is expansive.
The catch-all term encompasses your favorite rides, yes, but also an assortment of industries, ranging from architecture to animation to cinema to engineering to writing to game design. And that's just a surface-level scan. Walt Disney Imagineering, the company's secretive arm devoted to theme park experiences, likes to say that there are more than 100 job classifications among its ranks.
The theme park industry is also stealthy, a world of heavily trained spokespeople and nondisclosure agreements.
But once a year the Themed Entertainment Association throws an event in Southern California designed to honor the best of the past year. Honorees can range from the high-profile — the dance-like movements of Walt Disney World coaster Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind — to important but lesser-known museum or new media offerings, such as Colored: The Unknown Life of Claudette Colvin, a traveling experience that arms attendees with augmented reality goggles and a small backpack, and sets them free to discover a forgotten story from the civil rights movement.
Accompanying the awards show are two days of panels and talks designed to give honorees the opportunity to discuss their projects. It provides a peek into the global theme park industry, and a high-level look at where the industry is heading.
I spent two days taking in these events in Hollywood, and this is what I learned.
Themed restaurants are becoming more interactive
Themed restaurants have come in and out of favor over the centuries — see the fanciful European-inspired façades and interiors of the World's Fair restaurants of the 1890s, or the theatrical restaurant culture of Paris in the 18th and 19th centuries. Our city, of course, has had a rich history of themed restaurants, eateries decorated like a prison in the 1920s and a submarine in the late 1980s.
Germany's aims to go one step further, merging the techniques of a slow-moving dark ride
