Over the past several months, Universal has installed facial recognition cameras at some attraction Express lanes throughout Universal Studios Florida
The newest facial recognition camera has been installed at the E.T. Adventure entrance. It’s housed in a gray and white pillar. The camera is behind a domed transparent piece of plastic. There is a white ticket-sized rectangle below the camera.
In August, a camera popped up in a themed pillar at the entrance to Revenge of the Mummy. The gray pillar features a yellow “Production” stamp.
Cameras where first noticed in DreamWorks Land when the area opened this May. One is at the Express entrance to the Trollercoaster
The other is at the DreamWorks Imagination Celebration theater.
The cameras aren’t in use yet but it seems Universal is preparing to regularly use them for the Express Pass system to scan guests’ faces instead of their passes. So far the cameras are only at Universal Studios Florida attractions.
Universal switched to a facial recognition system for park entry last year. All Universal guests have their faces scanned instead of fingerprints to prove their identity. Facial recognition for Express Pass has been used in the past with portable machines on wheels instead of these newer, more permanent installations.
Personally, I love the facial recognition at entry. As much as my lanyard is a part of my “uniform” when I go to UOR I’d be thrilled to use my face to get into the park, the UXP queue and lockers. (Universal uses facial recognition at lockers in Japan already!)
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I generally prefer less-invasive kinds of identification measures in life. I feel like facial-recognition tech has more likelihood to creep into other areas of experience and for other purposes, so it’s less attractive to me than a fingerprint at entry. But I can understand positives for others, for sure!
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Sadly, that’s not much of an option any more these days. Cameras are everywhere… Street cameras, doorbell cameras, office / retail locations have cameras to monitor guests and so many more…
At the Orlando parks they’ve been doing tracking via facial recognition for years for security and entry. It’s now just being placed in obvious locations for guests to use…
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I have very mixed feelings on this. I mean, how hard is it to just scan a card? I understand it will cut down on abuse, but I really don’t like that kind of information floating all over the place. On the other hand, as mentioned above this info already is floating around everywhere.
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This is not new at all… it’s just taken some time for them to bring it back with new tech after they dropped it while we were all wearing masks.
I definitely remember them using a pretty terrible facial recognition system for Express some years back… like in the 3 or so years running up to the pandemic. It almost never recognized me and required an override by the human standing there, even on day 3 or 4 of a trip. The tech has gotten so much better these days, though, that it should learn faces after the first few tries even if it misses on the first couple.
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