jungle cruise

Tonight we're really excited to install a 3D printed outrigger canoe into the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland. And we thought it was a great opportunity to see if 3D printing could actually have some advantages over traditional fabrication techniques.

This is the first time we're printing a prop that permanently live in one of our rides.

The new Jungle Cruise boat is made with this new technology that we're exploring called large format additive manufacturing.

Which is basically just making really big large 3D prints. And so this new boat was designed within R&D and then we collaborated with our vendor Haddy in order to 3D print the boat.

So our team actually went to a series of conferences, conventions, and network to try to find the right company out there. And we stumbled across Haddy and found that they were able to manufacture huge objects just like our parks need at a really high quality. And we partnered with them to elevate them up to an even higher level that is consistent with what we would expect inside the company.

3D printing and Disney is in a way a match made in heaven, but it's one that's developed over 40 years. And 40 years because 3D printing for a long time has just been about prototyping. But what Haddy's industrialized is the ability to be able to make things that are functional and to be able to repeat that many times. So it allows us to be able to make things that are reliable, less expensive, faster developed, and replicable in any park all over the world.

We had the old boat and we did do a 3D scan in order to get it dimensionally. And then for the creative part of it, we had a photo of the boat from 1960s. And so using the dimension from the 3D scan, I modeled the new boat, which was what we used to 3D print the boat.

So this project right now is the premier project that we are working on to show that we can use advanced fabrication, robotic manufacturing and new materials to bring parks to life faster and more effectively.

Technology's advancing around the world in all kinds of ways. And we've got to make sure that it's keeping up for theme parks. And you know, we look at all the menu we have of things we're going to build. We've got, you know, parks around the world that we're going to be building in the next 5 to 10 years. I think we're excited that we can be a part of making sure we can take advantage of these new technologies when we build our new parks.