One of our more popular Disney and Travel topics here at families.com is how to plan your Disney vacation. Even the most frugal of trips to a Disney attraction can be expensive. So it’s important to do a lot of research before embarking on a Disney vacation.
Now Disney has partnered with Google to create a new way for web users to start researching and planning their trip to Disney World. Using the Google Earth program, downloadable onto your home computer, you can take a virtual tour of Disney World from the comfort of your own home.
The Disney World Google Earth tour offers descriptions of attractions, event calendars, tickets, and more. The Disney World website offers instructions for how to download and run the program.
At first I was skeptical of the feature, mostly because I am unimpressed by Google Earth. Why download a whole program to run on the computer when most of the images and information are also available via the “satellite view” option on the Google Maps website?
But this particular Disney web function offers a lot more than a birds-eye view of your car parked in your driveway. I played with it for awhile in order to see the information available for myself.
The Disney World Google Earth feature offers an impressive array of information on the parks, all neatly organized by geographic location for easy access. Because you’re viewing everything in 3D, all the information you want is spread out before you on the screen.
Clicking on the golden Mouse Ears icon allows users to pick the specific park (Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, etc.) that they want to explore. Once in view of the chosen park, clusters of maps and photographs of relevant landmarks, like Cinderella Castle and the Riverboat, are on display.
More details are available for popular rides/attractions like Space Mountain. Clicking on that link, for example, gives users a quick video of the ride and provides detailed information like a description of the ride, its height requirements, and its location.
Because the web feature is through Google Earth and not just the Disney website, more information than just what Disney provides is available. Google lists the surrounding restaurants and hotels. Clicking on those links brings up pop-up windows at the bottom of the screen, displaying the Google Maps or Wikipedia pages for the selected establishment.
Sometimes even clicking on an attraction listing pulls up the Wikipedia page. This can be jarring, because that is information provided by an outside website and not Disney. Officially sponsored Disney links are denoted on the map by a pair of Mickey Mouse ears, whereas any other icon redirects to a third-party source.
Though it was confusing at first, I enjoyed being able to gain information both from Disney and from other sources. This served to give me a more well-rounded perspective on the Disney World experience.
I only had one qualm with Google Earth’s Disney World feature: in the more crowded areas, such as Magic Kingdom, so many clusters of information were available that it was difficult to select the one I wanted. I kept getting redirected to different links near the actual one I wanted.
But other than that small bug, I enjoyed my 3D tour of Disney World. I’d highly recommend it to anyone planning a trip to Disney World, and I think that the executives at Disney and Google should start working on a similar feature for Disneyland.
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