We’re just a few weeks away from the Toy Story franchise returning to the big screen with Toy Story 5but in the lead-up, Disney has quietly upgraded one of its most iconic attractions themed after one of the main characters of Walt Disney World.
A staple of the Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Florida, Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin is a classic interactive dark ride where guests board a rotating vehicle, pick up a blaster and try to rack up points by hitting targets while helping Buzz Lightyear and Star Command defeat Zurg.
Spoiler: a lot of technology is used here. New haptics inside completely redesigned blasters, upgraded tracking systems and onboard computers.
At its core, the biggest shift in Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin isn’t visual—it’s interactive. The attraction has always been a competitive shooter, but the new version is built to be far more responsive and dynamic in how it reacts to guests in real time.
It starts with the new blasters, which are no longer attached to the wheelchair, but can be lifted and aimed freely. They vibrate with haptics and play audio feedback to confirm when you’ve made contact with a target – changes that make the moment-to-moment gameplay feel far more immediate.
The more significant shift is in what you actually shoot at. Goals are no longer static props. They light up, change color and carry dynamic point values that change throughout the ride – effectively turning the attraction into something closer to a real-time game than a traditional dark ride.
Klein says that was the basic design goal. “The dynamic nature of the goals is the biggest leap,” he explains. “Before, this was a very static attraction. None of the targets necessarily responded. It was hard to see where you were aiming and what you were actually hitting.”
Now, targets encourage guests to scan the entire environment instead of fixating on a single high-value location. “With these goals that light up with different colors and have different dynamic scores, it really encourages the guest to look around,” Klein noted.
He is quick to note that the underlying technology philosophy was “innovation versus invention”—taking tried and true technology and implementing it thoughtfully. “A lot of what was done here is taking the best of all the different Buzz Lightyear attractions around the world, and some other attractions as well, and trying to blend them into something that kept the soul of the original but improved it where we could.”
The most technically surprising aspect of the renovation isn’t something guests will see — it’s what’s running beneath the surface, powered by Epic Games’ Unreal Engine.
“Each ride vehicle actually hosts the Unreal Engine for the score content you see,” Klein explains. The dynamic score screens that show your ranking and progression to the next level do not draw from a static asset library. Each vehicle runs two independent Unreal implementations – one per plays, as each car has room for two – and generates this content locally in real time.
It’s a remarkably different use of game engine technology than what Disney typically uses in major attractions. “This is a really interesting way to use the technology in an embedded context,” Klein says, distinguishing it from larger projection-based systems like the one used on the Millennium Falcon, which itself will be upgraded on May 22 with new themed elements The Mandalorian and Grogu.
In addition to the vehicles, every goal and scoring system across the attraction is networked. Klein notes that over 200 machines are managed daily to keep everything in sync and consistent. The result is a ride that behaves less like a single attraction and more like a distributed computing system.
The same engine also played a central role in the creative process – most notably in working with Pixar on the ride’s projected media, most notably in a hyperspace tunnel scene, which is probably my favorite addition.
“We were able to work with Pixar to develop the full attraction in a virtual environment prior to visualization,” explains Klein. For the Hyperspace scene in particular, Pixar’s media drafts were loaded directly into the simulation, allowing Imagineering’s creative director to walk through the space in virtual reality and evaluate how the media reads from different angles inside the physical space.
This mattered because the projection room is unusually shaped. “The room is oddly shaped, so there was a unique challenge in making sure the media actually read well from all the different angles and perspectives from the driving vehicle,” says Klein.
The same environment was used to test motion profiles for new characters, including a new animatronic named Buddy, and to evaluate how scenes would read from a moving vehicle at real driving speed.
It’s a truly impressive use of the technology—not just as a tool for remote collaboration across shores, but as a common point of reference that lets different teams weigh in on each step of the process. Especially useful for a trip like this where teams from Walt Disney Imagineering and Pixar Animation Studios worked together.
What emerges is a version of Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin that still feels familiar on the surface, but functions fundamentally differently. The layout, the story, the vehicles – all preserved.
Klein’s own personal record on the attraction stands at 20.1 million points — a score he’ll tell you required more than 100 rides and a few lucky stops to achieve.
For Disney Imagineering, the renovation is another step toward treating physical attractions less as static environments and more as evolving, software-driven systems that push guest immersion to infinity and beyond.
Or as Klein puts it: taking something loved and “living it up and just adding it up where we could.”
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