A brief correction from the Progress City Department of Humble Mea Culpas…
You might recall in all the discussion of the NextGen technology initiative that’s underway at Disney, there was some talk of how this would be implemented. Some suggested that RFID chips would be embedded into guests’ tickets or room keys, while others thought that they might make their way into rubber wristbands. This is a model that is used at a number of other parks and water attractions.
Anyway, about the time that there was buzz about these possible wristbands, the term “X-Band” was… bandied… about and I reported here that it was a possible name for the wristbands – if Disney decided to go in that direction.
Of course, if I had bothered to read the literature, I would have known that the X-band is part of the microwave spectrum that it is hoped can be used for RFID applications. As I understand it, increasing the use of RFID tags depends mostly on lowering their price. This could be achieved through miniaturization, which would allow the chip and its antenna to be cut from the same die. The smaller antenna, the higher the broadcasting frequency needs to be, which pushes the RFID transmission into this now-famous X-band.
Keep in mind this is entirely a layman’s interpretation of some journal articles. Most of what I know about physics was left in Dr. Kolena’s classroom lo those many years ago. But I just wanted to let you know that if you were waiting for your Disney’s X-Band t-shirts, it’s not going to happen.
With Jim MacPhee now in charge of the Next Generation Experience at Walt Disney World, we’ll hopefully be hearing something about this program fairly soon.
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