Wands, Bands, and the Promise of Peripheral Play

The Wizarding World of Harry Potter™ Wands

The Sell: Diagon Alley™ at Universal Studios, Hogsmeade™ at Islands of Adventure, and The Wizarding World of Harry Potter™ at Epic Universe offer an incredible backdrop for any budding witch or wizard. If you’re lucky, you get to experience the Ollivanders™ show, where a small group watches as a “wand chooses a wizard.” It’s a piece of intimate theatre which sets the tone for the narrative-led experience that ensues. 

The Play: Once armed with an Interactive Wand, you cast spells across the Harry Potter locations.  This play promise is highly alluring, offering a degree of magical mastery that feels perfectly suited for any Harry Potter fan. 

Bronze medallions embedded in the ground indicate spell-casting locations and the precise wand movement required. While these moments are fun, the real depth comes from completing adventures – quest-like sequences that create a light narrative progression. In Hogsmeade, for example, one adventure’s finale ends at the Duelling Club tent, where you complete a series of spells to earn your place in the ‘club’.

Spell-casting at the windows is a two-stage process: the first spell ‘wakes up’ the window and presents a secondary goal, and the second spell provides feedback that directs you to your next location. It’s a simple system that deepens agency and extends interaction time without needing the app.

There are some really neat touches, where your selected Hogwarts House changes the content you encounter in the windows, as well as some very magical vibration and lighting effects on the wand during certain spells.

Across the parks, a wide variety of interactive windows offer moments of surprise and delight for guests, keeping the experience consistently interesting. The magic extends beyond the windows, too, allowing guests to cast spells on physical props. Notable examples include the magically raining umbrella light in Diagon Alley and the weather-altering spells that transform the sky in Knockturn Alley.

The App: The companion Universal Play App connects to the Interactive Wand via a simple QR code scan. While the 1st-generation wands treated the app as an afterthought, the 2nd-generation wands boast an evolved experience, allowing you to create a wizard profile, earn house points, and track your adventure progress.

While Universal has clearly made efforts to keep players “off-app” – starting with the gorgeously printed maps of Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley and continuing with the newly installed instructional digital books found in the windows – the presence of the app steers the once purely “eyes-up” experience closer to a “heads-down” model. We personally found it a critical reference for completing the Adventures.

The Sell: In contrast to The Wizarding World,  the purchase of peripheral – the Power-Up Band – is done with straightforward, game-like efficiency. 

Available to buy from Kiosk, guests simply choose their favourite design representing a different character from the game. At $45, the price point feels low enough to consider multiple bands per family group. The actual design is satisfyingly tactile, with the RFID encased in soft-touch plastic and attached to a comfortable snap band.

The Play: Super Nintendo World is a bold, chaotic land that perfectly transfers the visual language of the games into a real-world space. 

Entering the park through a “pipe”, with accompanying sound effects, is an awesome transition into the game world. As you walk over the threshold, you are bombarded by a place you recognise and love, but at a scale you don’t. It’s discombobulating in the best possible way.

The world – and the Power-Up Band – truly delivers ‘wide-wall play’ for all. You can collect coins by bashing blocks (and participating in rides), collect keys through physical mini-games (such as bashing ringing alarm clocks), and find collectable achievement ‘stamps’ hidden in plain sight. Collecting three keys grants exclusive access to the Bowser Jr. final battle.

In the adjoining DK land, this system is used to collect the letters “K O N G”, a simple but satisfying pursuit that drives exploration. Various other physical mini-games, like a music sequencer or a DK drumming game, are also available and don’t require a band.

The App: Like the Interactive Wands, the Power-Up Band‘s companion experience is part of the Universal Play App and connects via QR code.

The setup involves choosing a team (e.g. Team Toad) and pairing additional bands to track group progress. It provides leaderboards for guest and team play, alongside meta-game progress for stamps and keys. This progress feels core to the experience, but the app’s potential for overuse is mitigated by in-park screens that allow players to check stats without being glued to their phones – a smart move, particularly for children without phones.

The two experiences demonstrate different approaches to experiential merchandising, ‘eyes-up’ play, and app integration. What insights can be gleaned from their different strategies?

Experiential Merchandising

A core opportunity for peripheral play is that the fundamental purchase is part of the experience. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter™ wands are a masterclass in this “experiential merchandising”. The purchase is framed as a core narrative moment, epitomised in the Ollivanders™ show. This emotional upsell transforms what is ultimately a piece of sculpted plastic into your wand, forging an immediate, personal connection that warrants the price point.

In contrast, Super Nintendo World treats the Power-Up Band more functionally. You buy your band, themed to your favourite character, from a kiosk or vending machine. The focus is on function and character affinity, a “pick up and play” ethos that quickly gets you into the action but lacks much in the way of affinity of ceremony. It feels less like acquiring a magical artefact and more like buying a required accessory to play the game fully. 

This highlights a key strategic question for designers: Is the goal an emotional upsell or immediate access to gameplay? For some brands, the story of the sale is as important as the play that follows; for others, speed-to-play is paramount.

The ultimate goal of peripheral play should be to keep guests’ eyes up, focused on the multi-million-dollar environments around them, not on a screen.

The Power-Up Band’s design offers a compelling lesson in reliably handling high-volume, kinetic games. The simple interaction language of punching and tapping is intuitive and, crucially, never failed once during our visit. This robust and reliable technology provides a satisfying and consistent gameplay loop that encourages physical exploration and keeps guests present in the meticulously designed world.

The Interactive Wands, on the other hand, while offering moments of true magic, can sometimes suffer from finicky technology, which can lead to moments of frustration that break the immersive spell. While the 2nd-generation wands have made improvements, the need for precise movements and the occasional unreliability of the tech highlight the challenge of balancing complex interactions with the need for a seamless “eyes-up” experience. 

This contrast highlights the challenge of balancing complex interactions with a seamless “eyes-up” experience. In our experience, the most powerful moments were the simplest ones where the technology becomes invisible and the magic – or game – just feels real.

Integrating apps with these peripherals is not a compromise or a limitation, but a deliberate design tool that serves a strategic purpose. To frame it as a simple “eyes-up vs. heads-down” trade-off is to miss the point. The real question is how different screen-use models can be linked to intentionally different types of guest experience and long-term engagement.

The app is a strategic tool for driving the metagame for an IP like Super Nintendo World, which is built on games, competition, and collecting. The core gameplay loop – collecting keys to fight Bowser Jr, for example – almost requires an app layer for accurate tracking, progress visibility, and comparison with friends. The app drives progression, leaderboards, team play, and revisit motivation, reframing its integration as an intentional design choice tailored to deliver repeatable, competitive, progression-based fun. 

For the second-generation Interactive Wands, the app adds a layer of progression and quests missing from the first-generation wands. While this does risk shifting focus from the physical world to a screen, it also adds depth and replayability that were previously lacking. 

Designers must use the app to enhance, not detract from, the core physical experience, as this is where true depth and long-term engagement can lie.

The question is not which peripheral is better, but which design strategy best serves a specific IP and its unique goals. The wands excel at narrative immersion, while the Power-Up Band offers a more reliable and replayable experience.

The most important takeaway is that both signal a shift in theme park design. The Interactive Wands teach us the power of experiential merchandising, while the Power-Up Bands demonstrate how to design for robust, high-volume, kinetic play. Both show us that the future of theme park interactivity lies in creating seamless, intuitive, and deeply engaging experiences that allow guests not simply to witness a story, but to truly play a part in a living world.

What is coming next? Watch this space.