After stepping through a Floo chamber and teleporting in a puff of green smoke to a vast and stunning re-creation of the Ministry of Magic, I found myself boarding an elevator. Or something like one. That was after I combed through hallways and rooms where characters spoke to me from paintings and posters, but before I seemed to fly and dip and roam through a simulation of a magical world. Or maybe it was real. Or maybe it was both. As I saw characters appear and get swept away and vast spaces full of detail, I kept asking myself, “Is that a screen? Or an animatronic? Or both? Am I moving or staying still?”
I’ve spent a lot of time with virtual technologies; headsets that try to mix reality with high-resolution displays, glasses that make things appear before me or create sounds that aren’t there. At its best moments, Universal’s newest theme park, Epic Universe, located in the theme park mecca of Orlando, Florida, blended virtual and reality so fluidly that even I was fooled.
Universal’s latest theme park is a super-immersive wager, upping the ante in a world that’s only getting weirder and more immersive. Rides are more intense, screens are everywhere and theme park lands have been aiming for a full-escape journey to a bubble universe for years. Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge at the Disney parks, all the Harry Potter parts of Universal that already exist, and hyper-maximalized surrealist installations like Meow Wolf. And then VR and mixed reality.
Watch this: Up Close With Dragons and Frankenstein: Epic Universe Tech That Blew Us Away
Immersiveness, revamped
Everything at Epic Universe is about gates and portals to other places. Portals within portals.
I came to preview Epic Universe ahead of its May 22 opening with my colleague, Bridget Carey, because I was so incredibly curious about how a full-blown, multibillion-dollar ground-up reimagining of the theme park formula could take the idea of immersiveness even further, to a place where technology would play a bigger role.
I can’t say I have all the answers yet, but after speed-running most of the major attractions and entering through portal tunnels into each of the park’s four self-contained sub-worlds, what struck me the most was that these screens are improving. These robots are getting better. The line between virtual and real is getting thinner. The formula is being further finessed.
Again, screens are everywhere and I kept having my eyes drawn to them. Many of the rides at Epic Universe don’t use any screen technologies at all, such as high-speed coasters like the ridiculously fast Stardust Racers or Nintendo World’s Donkey Kong Mine-Cart Madness, which has surprise track-jumping illusions that happen through brilliant invisible engineering design.
What wowed me the most, maybe, were the two shows I saw: The Untrainable Dragon at the How to Train Your Dragon-themed Isle of Berk, and Cirque Arcanus at the Wizarding World’s Ministry of Magic.
Inside the preshow area of Cirque Arcanus, the immersive show in Wizarding World’s Paris that blends screens, performers, puppets and more.
Both shows, not to give away spoilers, are full of dragons and magical creatures that emerge at a massive scale in all directions. Sometimes they’re animatronic-based… I think. Sometimes, they’re puppets. Sometimes, they’re brilliant mechanical stage creations. And sometimes, they’re part of displays that blanket the sets. The handoffs between one effect and another felt like magic tricks, choreographed cleverly, and there were so many moments where I wasn’t sure where the handoff was. I just let go and enjoyed it for the magic show it is.
Theme parks as a testbed for new technologies
A robotic Toothless dragon you can get up close with at the park, if you wait.
The magic tricks continue outside the rides, too. A stunning robotic version of How To Train Your Dragon’s Toothless is waiting for guests to come up and pet it. A little farther away, a baby dragon, Dart — a walking robot — pads along on little legs and draws a big crowd, its movements feeling uncannily like a living cartoon. Another dragon walks by, too, but this one’s puppeted. And it’s also super-charming. (Dragons also poke their heads out of stables, while some sleeping ones have slowly wagging tails.)
It’s also the scale of the worlds: Entering from the enclosed portal tunnels and finding sometimes shockingly vast spreads of detail can feel jaw-dropping. My first entrance into the Ministry of Magic’s Paris streetscape or Super Nintendo World’s Mushroom Kingdom just made me beam goofy smiles and think, “God, they did it.” By design, it’s too much to take in.
If you’re patient enough to wait, a fully robotic Dart, a baby dragon, will make an appearance. It’s adorable.
I practice magic off and on for fun. I think about how magic, as an art, often thinks of the effect first and then invents multiple techniques to get there. Theme park design feels the same. It doesn’t matter how you make an amazing, adorable dragon, as long as it feels amazing and adorable.
As a tech reviewer, I’m constantly looking at devices that have particular functions and use those to make their magic. Theme parks can pick and choose, using an AR headset here (Nintendo’s Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge, which has a snap-on AR display visor that makes ghostly video game characters appear on your track), Bluetooth wearables somewhere else (Power-Up Bands that tap against parts of the Nintendo World landscape so you can play mini-games), infrared (the Wizarding World wands) and face scanning (the lockers and admission gates at the park, which use camera-based face recognition instead of tapping a park admission card).
Sometimes, the seams appear and it gets awkward. Face recognition can be slow, and I don’t always love pairing wearables with arcane theme park apps that don’t explain things as well as they should. But I love looking at theme parks because they’re a self-contained space to explore new technologies in a way that can be completely controlled, a testbed that’s something the real world can’t do nearly as easily.
The entry point to the Isle of Berk.
But the place where things feel most seamless right now is where rides and shows meet the assistance of screens and blended technologies — when they work, at least. The Battle for the Ministry of Magic ride, the most complex attraction at Epic Universe, stopped midway through our first ride with a technical problem before resuming a few minutes later. It was briefly illusion-breaking, before things started back up and we were swept away again.
The more pieces in an immersive experience, the greater the possibilities for things to go wrong. Disney’s most advanced Star Wars attraction, Rise of the Resistance, is known for periodically shutting down or certain parts not fully working. It’s unclear what Universal’s track record for these newest groundbreaking experiences will be.
Mixed reality feelings
The Donkey Kong Country part of Epic Universe’s Super Nintendo World, another portal to another world.
My favorite moments at Epic Universe were the ones when I could just leave all my devices behind and experience being transported. That’s not easy during a press preview day, where you’re also constantly capturing video and photos and zipping ahead to take in the next attraction at a rapid-fire clip. I kept trying to “be there” more, taking breaks when I could, from holding up my phone or wearing Meta Ray-Ban glasses to record while just looking around and wandering.
This park is made for losing yourself in these elaborate worlds, checking out little details — the Pikmin lurking on ledges in Super Nintendo World, the shop windows in Wizarding Paris and the abandoned wagon in Dark Universe with jars of eyeballs and other pickled parts. Or little performances from real people: A sinister violinist who warns us of strange things and then madly walks away, or the proud dragon trainers in the Isle of Berk.
An animatronic house elf in one part of the line for the Battle for the Ministry of Magic ride.
Way back in 2016, I said a real-world immersive theater experience in New York felt more like virtual reality than any headset I wore that year. In 2018, I felt that way about how another theater experience simulated AR, and in 2023, Meow Wolf made me feel metaverse thoughts more deeply than tech companies could.
Art and entertainment can model the future in aspirational ways, sometimes with actual tech and other times with magic tricks and a little bit of theater. At its best moments, Epic Universe made me feel a mixed-reality blend more advanced than any headset has. And, with all respect to Mario Kart’s AR visor glasses, my favorite rides were ones that had no intermediary at all, just using the world around me to blend realities in nearly invisible ways.
The preshow of Monsters Unchained: The Frankenstein Experiment, the last area we could record before the ride. The animatronics here walk and move shockingly well.
However, the very best things I tried were also things I couldn’t take pictures or videos of. We could record everything at the park except for the rides and shows themselves. That was disappointing, but I don’t think recording it would even help explain how it feels in the moment.
I’m used to that with experiences in immersive tech like VR and AR; to be in a headset is completely different than the capture you might see on a screen. Maybe it’s just as well. I had to leave my own devices in my pockets or lockers and take everything in with my own eyes and remember them later as I wanted to… or as the illusions crafted it for me, like the best magic tricks. I thought about them later, wondering, “How did they do that, exactly?”
Epic Universe: A supercharged escape from reality
As good as Epic Universe is, it’s also a theme park made in a traditional mode. The “hub and spokes” design iterates on a classic model dating back to Disneyland. I’d love it if theme parks could break the mold even more and get wildly experimental, but I’m not sure that would ever happen at the price of making theme parks.
All the lands in Epic Universe are based on extremely strong intellectual properties, known movies, monsters and games — except for Celestial Park, which has a relaxing steampunk Atlantis vibe, full of gardens, fountains and statues. But it also acts like an immersive palate cleanser between deep dives, a place to reset and perhaps decompress. Epic feels like a supercharged, rebooted approach to escaping realities and going somewhere else via its portals — and sometimes, even portals within portals.
The portal into Super Nintendo World, which has an escalator taking you up into the sub-park,
And now, coming back again, I’m finding that my memories of it are getting stronger than my initial experience. It feels more legendary, which is probably the whole idea. I want to transport back. And, yes, it’s top of the list for my next family vacation: I wish they could have been there with me, and they definitely feel the same. It’s expensive, but this park is clearly the big one to visit right now, and it earns that prize.
Some mixed reality experiences on headsets are starting to step up to ideas that approach being this transportive. But Epic’s improved-looking tech is a great reminder of how good the blends are already becoming. Mario Kart’s AR visor tech, already four years old since its debut in Japan in 2021, made me wonder what comes next. If Epic Universe is any indication, we’re just at the beginning of the blend.
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