"If I'm standing here, Mickey is there, how do I make my way to Mickey?" said Ryan Hughes, vice president of business development and strategic partnerships at Verizon. "If we're dying for food, where's the closest restaurant? How do we find our way there?"
This communication could extend beyond the park, with Disney sharing personalized mementos of the visit, such as a photograph from Sleeping Beauty along with a message, thanking the young guest for visiting her castle.
Disney and Verizon executives say they have no intention of bombarding park guests with marketing pitches for fear of intruding on privacy or detracting from the experience.
"This is not us shooting out random messages; it's about the guest experience," said Disney parks spokesman John Nicoletti.
But places that have adopted similar technology have found the temptation to pitch incessantly hard to resist. In cellphone-centric Japan, event posters feature small, bar-code-like images that contain coded information. When photographed by cellphone, the image takes the would-be concertgoer to an online ticketing site.
"There's just an awful lot of experimentation right now. People understand these phones are very much a part of people's lives," said Gene Jeffers, executive director of the Themed Entertainment Assn., an alliance of companies that design, create and build theme park attractions. "Disney has really been a leader in terms of the theme parks exploring these technologies and how they could be used."
Jeffers said the amusement park industry looks to Disney as a technological trailblazer, because it has the resources to experiment with innovative applications of technology. Last year, for example, children who brought their Nintendo DS hand-held game consoles to Disneyland and Disney World could use the gadget's wireless capability to conduct virtual treasure hunts, seeking out hidden "hot spots" throughout the parks and downloading exclusive content for their Pirates of the Caribbean game.
Despite the marketing bonanzas such technology promises -- imagine one day approaching a Starbucks and your cellphone buzzes with 50 cents off a frothy pumpkin-flavored latte -- Disney and others must be careful about overreaching, analysts warn.
"The challenge for parks is, how do you become part of that process without being too intrusive?" Jeffers said. "Helping to ensure that the viewer is also experiencing where they are, so they don't become isolated within the device, so to speak."
