PERSONALIZED THEME EXPERIENCES
UCF M.F.A. in Themed Experience Design: Thesis
AT A GLANCE
Digital platforms like Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, and Spotify quietly personalize almost every interaction. Their recommendation systems watch what we choose, how long we stay, and what we ignore, then decide what to show next.
Most immersive attractions still present the same version of the story to every guest. This thesis explores what happens when we borrow ideas from recommendation systems and adapt them for location based entertainment, so attractions can respond to the people inside them while preserving creative authorship and operational reliability.
The work combines research in recommendation systems and behavioral science with themed entertainment and game design, and then tests those ideas in an original walkthrough attraction concept called The Nexus. The result is a designer facing framework: something creative teams can use in the room, not just an academic model.
My Role:
I translated concepts from collaborative filtering, content based and sequential recommendation, and reinforcement learning into tools that writers, directors, and producers can use without needing a machine learning background.
On the design side, I created The Nexus as a proof of concept: a complete attraction built around an adaptive loop. I used it to pressure test how personalization could work with real constraints such as throughput, show timing, and brand or franchise guardrails.
WHY PERSONALIZATION MATTERS
Guests spend much of their day inside personalized ecosystems that reduce choice overload and surface relevant content. When they arrive at a park or museum, the context is different, but there's a growing expectation that the experience should be personalized.
Guests expect some acknowledgment of their preferences, even in subtle ways. Adaptive moments can make experiences feel more alive and more personal. Variation and discoverability are key to encouraging repeat visits. Importantly, many useful forms of personalization can come from creative and operational design, not just large engineering projects.
THE ADAPTIVE LOOP
Guests express signals
Through path choices, dwell time, interactions with artifacts, responsiveness to prompts, and comfort with intensity or social play.
The system interprets those signals
A lightweight preference model groups these behaviors into a few useful dimensions such as curiosity, thrill tolerance, social engagement, or affinity for certain narrative themes, inspired by how classic recommenders infer preferences from interaction histories.
The experience selects the next state
Based on the current preference estimate and operational constraints, the attraction chooses which version of a scene, transition, or environmental state to present next – from a set of predesigned, approved options.
The model updates as the experience continues
Each new choice or behavior adjusts the preference estimate, allowing the experience to change emphasis over time without losing coherence.
How creative teams can use this
The thesis turns the adaptive loop into a set of patterns that fit into existing design and production workflows.
Adaptive attractions provides meaningful agency to guests. Using immersive interactives like which role they choose to adopt, what merchandise they purchase, or how they interact with the environment acts as the seed for generating personal preference models for each guest. Using these profiles aspects of the narrative can change including the overarching story, media (such as lighting, audio, and video), ride vehicle movement, etc. to help reinforce the optimal emotional arc.
Outcomes
This thesis delivers three things that are directly useful to studios and project teams:
-
A shared language for adaptive experiences, via the adaptive loop and preference dimensions, so creative and technical partners can talk about personalization in the same terms.
-
A set of reusable patterns for adaptive preshows, branching hubs, scene variants, and environmental modulation that can be scaled to different IP and venues.
-
A full prototype attraction, The Nexus, that demonstrates how these ideas can live inside a cohesive, canon friendly experience.
In practice, this thinking shows up in how I structure attractions like Jurassic World: The Experience, how I plan modular scenes and cultural touch points for Avatar: The Experience, and how I map emotional arcs and connective tissue in projects like Harry Potter: Visions of Magic. For a studio or park, the framework offers a way to layer meaningful personalization onto new or existing attractions, using tools teams already understand, and to decide where deeper data or technology investment will have the most creative impact.