Disney Looks To Add Projectors To Cake

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You know, folks, I love cake like, well, like a fat kid loves cake. But even I was a little taken aback by Disney’s plan to turn cakes into marvelous interactive presentations  through the use of pico projectors.

Most of us are probably already familiar with pico projectors: the smallest projectors out there that are often a little dim and tiny but still put out a fairly sizable image at decent resolution. But what Disney’s got in mind for them is something wholly unique, which isn’t really a surprise given Disney’s reputation for pushing the envelope in terms of technology to entertain us.

What Disney’s got in mind is, basically, to park a pico projector and camera above the cake, which will in turn be able to tell where a guest is cutting the cake. And then, the projector will display a video relevant to the portion of the cake cut. One key example given was, if you were to cut into a lake depicted on the cake’s surface, you would then watch, slightly awestruck, as water started to flow off the side of the cake and down onto the tabletop, as though you had breached an actual small lake.

Moreover, Disney’s got plans for special utensils that will work on this system, like turning a fork into a magic wand that trails sparkly bits or trigger a sword fight with Disney’s own Captain Hook when a knife is brought into range of the cake.

Disney has always been one of those places that searches for innovation just about everywhere–watch the Travel Channel sometime and see what all they’ve got cooking out there; it’s patently unbelievable some of the stuff they come up with–but even this stretches things just a little. I can see innovative new rides and attractions, but turning a birthday cake into a multimedia presentation seems a little outlandish even by my standards.

Still though, it should be interesting to see once in your lifetime, and though there’s no word on when these cakes will make it to Disney tables, it’ll likely be worth the wait.