Disney and Chevrolet teamed up to give Test Track, a ride that opened originally in 1999, a fresh coat of paint. The high-speed thrills remain from the original model, but the new and improved Test Track makes design and customization the main attraction. Like sketches on paper, each design starts with a simple sketch. Luckily, Disney created some great software that lets aspiring designers skip art school. Your mileage may vary — both in terms of how your virtual car performs and the quality of the design. RFID tags let visitors carry their designs from one station to the next, and see periodic updates on how the theoretical design would have performed during the in-car element of the ride. After the ride is over, each rider can take the car they designed and drop it onto a videogame system the size of a pool table. The design of each person's car impacts its competitiveness in the videogame. Designers can take photos next to a virtual version of their car in a faux photo studio. From start to finish, the project took just 18 months and involved the efforts of designers from Disney and GM. Pictured left to right: Tony Warren, Sung Paik, Carrie Crawley, Tom Speedwell, Jeffrey Mylenek, Chris Webb, Adam Scenna, Rodney Jurban, Matthew Pussehl, Kevin Wilson.

The Walt Disney Company recently unveiled a massive overhaul of their Test Track high-speed driving simulator at EPCOT center in Orlando. None of the famous cartoon characters make an appearance, but the ride does feature an unlikely new star: CAD software.

The original version of the ride focused on the rigorous testing process GM cars go through. Visitors would endure an hour-long wait in line while watching videos of crash tests, enjoy 5 minutes of high-speed fun on the Test Track, and then get dumped into a showroom where they could sit in a brand new Chevy Malibu. Not exactly Disney's finest magic, and they knew it — so they set out to upgrade things.

The notes for the redesign were simple. Core ride mechanics couldn’t change, but the wait in line, the look of the ride, and the post-ride experience had to be reimagined for videogame-era attention spans.

GM tapped design manager Jeff Mylenek and his team to oversee the overhaul in partnership with Disney Imagineers. Instead of focusing on exciting Department of Transportation regulations, he wanted to get a new generation excited about design.

Now, when riders first enter the building sketches, clay models, and other tools of the designers trade surround them. He says “The goal is that guests have an idea of what it’s like to be a designer – this is their initiation. We wanted to give the guest a feeling about how the design process works."

Using a proprietary CAD program, each rider gets to design his or her own virtual car on a 42-inch touchscreen. Designs start as a simple line, drawn with a finger. Budding designers can tweak the curve and see their sketch become a 3-D model with the push of a button. Wheels can be tricked out and engines can be tuned, but at each step designers see how their decisions impact the car’s performance. For instance, bigger wheels give a car more control, but lower miles per gallon. Designs are saved and each creator gets an RFID card associated with their design.

After a few minutes of design time, the wannabe Harley Earls enter the ride, scan their RFID cards, and are whipped around corners at high speed. Everyone experiences the same physical ride, but at four checkpoints on the track, a leader board shows pictures of each of the cars the riders designed, along with stats about how their virtual cars would have fared on that section. After a final 65 MPH burst, riders get to see how their design performed in the simulation overall. They also see the highest scoring designs of the day, sparking ideas for new modifications and repeat rides.

“The old post-show experience encourages the guest to watch; the new show invites them to participate,” says Mylenek. Now, after the ride, designers scan their RFID cards and craft commercials featuring their cars, lean up against their virtual model for a green screen photo, and race their creations on a giant video game track. In the future, the hope is that a young designer could have their car 3-D printed as a souvenir.

Melissa Jeselnick, a Disney Imagineer who previously overhauled the Star Wars themed “Star Tours” attraction believes integrating technology into the parks is an important trend as attention spans shrink in today's Angry Birds era. She says “Technology lets us bring stories to parts of the parks that didn’t have story originally.” She also points to a recently launched Phineas and Ferb-themed, cell phone-driven virtual scavenger hunt as a way to get guests interacting with the park, without having to wait in a line.

There were also more pedestrian design challenges. This revamp was expected to last a decade or more, so the look and feel shouldn’t seem dated by next model year. Mylenek says “We didn’t want the story to get old as soon as it was installed. We chose technology that could be swapped out so that we can go back and replace elements, as things get better.” With 17 million people visiting the Disney Parks in Orlando every year, the systems had to be durable at able to withstand plenty of foot traffic.

Walt Disney was a perfectionist, but famously said he hoped that Disneyland would never be complete, so it could always be improved on. The Test Track revamp is a great example of creative reinvention, but also has the opportunity to imprint the fun of STEM education on young minds in a way a textbook never could.

Photos Courtesy of The Walt Disney Company