Disney’s new Star Wars Galactic Galactic Starcruiser immersive entertainment experience just hosted its first paying customers, prompting a massive number of YouTube posts and reviews on the experience.

First, if you’re not up on the whole thing, Theme Park Insider has a great first review of some of the technology systems used throughout the facility to help make the experience so incredibly personalized and interactive. Check it out.

One of the many amazing parts of the experience is the D3-09 “droid” that acts as a personal interactive assistant in each guest cabin. It is fully interactive, voice controlled/natural language character, presumably live-rendered.

Here is a very good overview of the actual experience, with a short Imagineer interview at ~17:00 in:

Disney Imagineering just posted a short background discussion on D3-09 R&D:

Such a “live character” will become fundamental to placemaking in the future. Obviously such tech will find home in hospitality and retail applications, but I’m sure it will eventually reach many applications, ranging from airports to healthcare.

The key thing is that the “character” may not be a “character” per se at all – meaning some form of faux human or animated character – it might just be the overall quality of the space and all of the various combined media systems that becomes the interactive sprite or avatar of the place itself.