VIDEOS: FIRST LOOK at MagicBand+ in ACTION in Disney World

Disney is releasing the new generation of MagicBands this summer, called MagicBand+. These bands will do everything that existing MagicBands do — like work as your ticket to the parks, your hotel key, and a method of payment — but they’ll also have some NEW interactive features.

MagicBand+

We’ve already checked out these MagicBands (when Disney accidentally released some early last week 😬), but the new features didn’t debut with the bands since that release was premature. Now we’ve got a first look at the MagicBand+ in action! 

At a media event today, we got to see some of the new features of MagicBand+. First of all, we took a look at all the designs that Disney will be releasing for these bands!

Lots of options!

There are some more basic bands in solid colors with Mickey on the front, or you can get 50th Anniversary bands, Disney Princess bands, a Minnie Mouse band with polka dots, a Star Wars band, and more.

 

 Disney has said that these are the bands being released for now, so more designs are likely going to come later.

Cute!

We put a band on to check out the new features!

Let’s check out the new features

We tried out the 50th Anniversary design, although the bands all have the same features.

 

First of all, MagicBand+ works as your park ticket (like normal MagicBands), so you can scan it to enter the theme parks. When you scan with MagicBand+, though, it lights up with rainbow colors!

 

 How pretty is that?

Rainbow colors

In addition, Disney said you can use MagicBand+ to interact with the gold character statues around the parks. We’ve been curious about how that works, and now we’ve finally got an answer.

Gold character statues

You can walk up to a statue and wave at the character (with the arm that has your MagicBand+ on it), and the characters will talk to you when they sense “your MagicBand’s pixie dust.”

 

We waved at Mickey, and he said, “Hello! It’s great to see everybody having so much fun!” We noticed that Mickey said different phrases to other people, so the character greetings seem to change.

With the Play Disney Parks App on your phone, you can also collect interactions with the characters by going to find them all in each park! (If you need some help with that, we’ve got the complete guide to finding all the 50th Anniversary gold character statues right here.)

Collecting statues

By collecting characters, you can unlock Augmented Reality portals to see different characters’ lands on your phone!

 

In addition to the rainbow lights and character statue interactions, the new MagicBand+ bands can turn you into a Bounty Hunter in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge in Disney’s Hollywood Studios.

‘Star Wars’ MagicBand+

We’ve already taken a look at how this will work, but today we got even more details.

When you use your MagicBand+ with the Play Disney Parks App on your phone, you can track down virtual bounties throughout the land and collect them to return to the guild master. These bounties start out pretty easy to find, but they get harder as you continue to collect them.

Finding bounties

We asked if you can collect all the possible bounties in a single day, and Disney told us that you would have to be very committed in order to achieve that. So it sounds like it can be done in one day, but practically, it’s more of a multi-visit experience.

These features (and possibly more) will debut with MagicBand+ when the bands are officially released this summer. Keep following DFB for more updates on the latest Disney news!

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Are you going to get one of the new MagicBands when they come out this summer? Let us know in the comments.

Disclosure: In nearly all circumstances, Disney Food Blog writers and photographers pay full price for their own travel, hotel, food, beverage, and event tickets. We do this because it’s important to us as journalists to ensure not only that we give you unbiased opinions, but also that you can trust us to do so since we’re paying our own way. On rare occasions, when we are invited by a company to attend a preview as media, and when we choose to accept that invitation, we will always make you, our readers, aware of that situation. Today, we were invited by Disney World to attend their media preview of MagicBand+. Note that when we attend events as media we are 1) Not required to review that event/food on any of our channels, and 2) Not required to review that event/food favorably. You can always count on DFB to give you a 100% unbiased and honest review of any event that we attend, food that we eat, or beverage that we drink. You can see more in our Disclosure Policy. Thank you for reading. — AJ

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