PSU.com has recently had the chance to venture to Seattle, Washington and attend Disney’s Magical Blu-ray Tour, and we are back to tell you of our adventures.
Disney has been touring the United States with the help of Panasonic, and other companies such as Monster Cables, and Sony. There are several stops in major cities across the US, in which a Blu-ray demonstration booth is set up. This booth is loaded with several of Panasonics flat screen HDTV’s each hooked up to a Blu-ray player. We spotted two PlayStation 3 consoles hooked up in addition to several Panasonic players.
The tour’s target audience is families, with a strong promotion of family friendly titles such as Cars, Ratatouille, and Pirates of the Caribbean being displayed. The tour is not just for children though, a spoken presentation with video integration gives a brief history describing Disney’s strive to stay on top of the technology and dedication to entertainment is actually quite entertaining and informative. It is a great way to show the benefits of Blu-ray to people who do not know. However, anyone who already owns Blu-ray will not likely benefit as much from this presentation.
Presentations aside, the displays they have set up are very nice to say the least. Shown at our stop were looping videos promoting Blu-ray showing various titles that are already out or are soon to be released. The most amazing video shown was Ratatouille. This movie is going to be nothing short of a must buy for any Blu-ray owner. The picture quality was simply stunning. Cars was also shown, along with a preview of an in movie game where the viewers play a “Where’s Waldo” like game in which you must find certain cars throughout the movie. This looks to be an entertaining game to add some spice to a movie you’ve seen several times. At the end of the movie, you will be given a total to how many cars you found, which ones they were, and a quick bio on each one. These games are a cool new feature that Blu-ray can provide over DVD’s.
Other games that were playable at the booth were “Liar’s Dice” from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, and an asteroid clone that is on Chicken Little. While neither of these are new titles or games, they give a good example of what Blu-ray can do.
A brief description of a Blu-ray network service was also mentioned, and while nothing has been confirmed yet, it sounds like online features could be in the pipeline fairly soon, with features such as downloadable content, and possibly even a chat application.
Bottom line, while not overly informative to current owners, this tour is nothing but good news to the Blu-ray side of this next-gen format war. Anything that Disney supports is likely to gain tremendous momentum as families are a large demographic who can easily decide the winner between Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Stay tuned for more updates as well as the latest news here at PSU.