Imagine a trip to an amusement park where you don’t have to worry about carrying a bag full of phones, wallets, cameras, keys, and tickets through the park with you.  Engineers at Walt Disney World in Florida have turned this dream into a reality with the creation and implementation of MagicBands, small bracelets that can hold all the information previously found in the aforementioned items.  

Walt Disney World has long been a joy-filled place for families, friends, and its employees.  Recently, while revamping the parks, Disney Imagineers began to change the way guests interact with the parks.  They wanted to rework the guests experience, and the idea of MagicBands was born.  These rainbow hued rubber bracelets allow guests access to the parks, their hotel rooms, fast passes, and can even be linked to credit cards and used to pay for items in the parks.  With just a flick of the wrist these ingenious bands have changed the way families approach their Disney vacation. The technology used has been spreading not just through the vacation industry, but the rest of the world as well.  These bands do have their drawbacks, especially to people concerned with the security of their information and the fact that the bands are tracking their movement through the parks.  

One big argument against making magicband like technology available in everyday life is, besides the obvious price tag of adding infrastructure across the country to support such an endeavor, is that people don’t want to be tracked and lose out on freedom despite the benefits and possibilities found in wearable technology.  

The concept of tracking people generally is fine when people are only monitored in a certain space and they are aware of it, and can turn it off somehow.  Things like restaurants giving you a tracker to locate your table or Disney following your movement to different rides are far different than your movements through a city being followed. 

Technology has always changed our lives, and before technology hits the main market it often has a smaller run in places like amusement parks, a controlled environment where futuristic technology is anticipated and met with excitement.  From the animatronics of opening day in Disney Land to the MyMagic+ system in place at Disney World, technology has consistently changed the way people vacation and spend money in the world. The bands contain RFID chips that can be tracked using radio waves and can store information regarding tickets and credit cards within them, to allow guests ease when enjoying the parks without worrying about belongings such as credit cards and physical tickets. The MyMagic+ system also allows guests to schedule passes to skip lines in advance and plan their day out to maximize their time in the park.  As the technology becomes more sophisticated Disney even hopes to be able to sense when a wearer touches certain objects and send them alerts and reminders based on that (Smartwatch Detects Objects).  There are a few downsides to these bracelets, including the discomfort people may feel that they are being tracked by the location finding feature of the MagicBands.   These technologies and more are also spreading to cruise lines, with Carnival’s ship being totally equipped with sensors to track their small “medallion” that has personal credit card, room, and location information (Barrett).  Sonja Th. Kwee-Meier, Jennifer E. Butzler, and Christopher Schlick wrote about the security measures useful to wearable technology, and the concerns over being tracked on cruise ships, but also the usefulness of these measures in tracking people in the event of an evacuation.  In the book Chipless RFID Reader Architecture the author clearly lays out how RFID technology works and provides the reader with an idea of what can be done with these RFID tags.  The security of users is of great importance to the creators of these technologies, especially as they become more widely adopted.  The “Internet of Things” as it is commonly known is growing rapidly and it is important to keep secure and accessible (Therier).  The wearable industry and the security associated with it is an important tool that needs to be monitored as it grows in scale and sophistication.  

Technology is created to make peoples lives easier, and the wearable technology fills a gap that was not previously touched upon.  Wearable technology has several technological advances that help it function in a useful and exciting way.  Generally wearable tech, especially Disney’s MagicBands, contain an RFID chip that can transmit information on radio waves from approximately 40 feet away (Kuang).  RFID chips are small enough to fit comfortably inside a small wristband or pendant and can be used to track location when the sensors are close to the chips.  The chips can also store information about credit cards, tickets, and act as keys.  
