philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Top 13 trends to watch in the visitor attractions industry in 2025

PhilNote: this long article is really a collection of examples.

... In 2025, technology will continue to change the attractions business. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a major cross-sector trend at the moment, but specific to the LBE field, immersive technologies are being utilised to provide pioneering experiences. Also, green technologies are being used to develop more sustainable attractions....

AI in museums, theme parks and water parks

When it comes to tech for good, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland has partnered with an AI startup company to tackle hate speech and antisemitism on social media. The startup, TrollWall AI, specialises in the automatic moderation of comments on social media based on AI models.

AI is also an attraction in its own right. New media artist Refik Anadol is to open the world’s first museum of AI arts, called Dataland, in downtown LA this year. “To have a permanent space for us to develop a new paradigm of what a museum can be, by fusing human imagination with machine intelligence and the most advanced technologies available, is a realization of one of my biggest dreams,” said Anadol. ...

At Blackpool Zoo, also in the UK, the keeper team is using coloured edible glitter to identify the sparkly poo of its female Asian elephants and monitor their reproductive cycles. “This highly intelligent and complex species is endangered in the wild and by collaborating, sharing research, and exchanging ideas, zoos play a crucial role in the global effort to protect and conserve these majestic animals,” said Adam Kenyon, section head at Blackpool Zoo. ...

Merging immersive art and wellness

A similar idea is from Meow Wolf co-founder Corvas Brinkerhoff, who’s launching an immersive spa called Submersive in Austin, Texas. Due to open from 2026, the wellness space will feature immersive art, video projections, lasers and AI. ...

The new concept is “reinventing the art of bathing” with spaces that “integrate immersive art, neuroscience and social bathing elements to deliver measurable and repeatable state changes”. ...

Year-round fear in the attractions business

But back to Universal, which is leading the way when it comes to permanent horror. The company is also launching a year-round horror experience at Area15 called Universal Horror Unleashed. The group’s first-ever permanent horror experience takes inspiration from Halloween Horror Nights at Universal parks and opens in Las Vegas next year. ...

Family coasters

Another growing attractions trend for 2025 is the rise in popularity of family coasters, as opposed to the record breakers. Instead of the tallest, fastest or longest in the world, guests are seemingly seeking family-friendly ride experiences. Disney parks have always offered attractions for the whole family. Recent additions include the Frozen-themed Wandering Oaken’s Sliding Sleighs at Hong Kong Disneyland, Tron: Lightcycle/Run at Magic Kingdom, and Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind at Epcot. ...

... places like Europa-Park have come up with game-changing concepts, such as Eatrenalin, a media-based multi-sensory restaurant where guests are seated on ride vehicles. ...

Streaming company Netflix is doing a similar thing with its Netflix House immersive entertainment venues, the first of which are opening in shopping malls in Texas and Pennsylvania in 2025. These experiential attractions will feature experiences, retail and food based on shows from Bridgerton to Stranger Things. ...

Additionally, established food and grocery brands can take advantage of attractions trends in 2025. Taco Bell, for example, launched an “early retirement community” pop-up experience for the old at heart (aka its members) in 2024. Guests enjoyed “senior-inspired, sun-soaked daytime recreation, retail and dining”.  ...

Scary overnight experiences growing in popularity ...

One of the most unique overnight experiences of last year was The Static Sea, a hybrid experience that took place online and on Flat Holm Island in the Bristol Channel in September 2024. Ahead of the launch, an online community was built around the story through online films, puzzles and interactive experiences. Guests were chosen via a lottery and visited the uninhabited island for a horror experience like no other. ...

The latest Airbnb experience is inspired by Gladiator II and is set to take place at the Colosseum in Rome, even if it has faced criticism from Italian officials. ...

Japan’s Studio Ghibli theme park, which is now fully open, celebrates the natural world that inspired the company’s animation. During construction, the team enhanced and preserved any natural areas, and no trees will be cut down to make room for future attractions. The park also limits daily attendance within its themed lands to protect the environment. ...

Immersive technologies

One of the fastest-growing attractions trends for 2025 is immersive technologies. These include AR, holograms, LED screens, AV tools and projection mapping, used to surround visitors in magical worlds. We expect to see much more from this attractions trend in 2025. Abba Voyage, for example, puts the band on the stage in a whole new way via cutting-edge technology, incredibly immersive lighting, and ABBA’s iconic songs. ...

Universal Epic Universe: attraction to redefine immersion 

Here’s what it includes: omnidirectional ride vehicles, a trackless ride system, high-resolution projections and media screens, smoke effects, motion simulation, interactive elements such as wands and wearables, real-time control systems, spatial audio technology, and AR. ...

Rounding out blooloop’s top attractions trends for 2025 is Qiddiya – a multibillion-dollar entertainment destination in Saudi Arabia. It will house more than 400 tourist attractions and experiences, including the Aquarabia water park, Six Flags Qiddiya City, the world’s first Dragon Ball theme park, and a gaming and esports district. 

Highlights also include an innovative stadium with state-of-the-art holographic technology and a performing arts centre that will enhance the theatre experience with technologies like VR, AR and AI. ... Federico Pienovi, CEO and chief business officer of new markets at Globant, said: “We are not building a smart city; but creating an immersive, digitally connected experience that brings Qiddiya to life in ways that go beyond traditional entertainment.”

See the full article here: https://blooloop.com/theme-park/in-depth/attractions-trends-2025/

How red teaming helps safeguard the infrastructure behind AI models

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Unique risks to AI models

According to Ruben Boonen, CNE Capability Development Lead at IBM: “One problem is that you have these models hosted on giant open-source data stores. You don’t know who created them or how they were modified, and there are a number of issues that can occur here. For example, let’s say you use PyTorch to load a model hosted on one of these data stores, but it has been changed in a way that’s undesirable. It can be very hard to tell because the model might behave normally in 99% of cases.” ...

Recently, researchers discovered thousands of malicious files hosted on Hugging Face, one of the largest repositories for open-source generative AI models and training data sets. These included around a hundred malicious models capable of injecting malicious code onto users’ machines. ...

In most cases, AI systems run on cloud architecture rather than local machines. After all, the cloud provides the scalable data storage and processing power required to run AI models easily and accessibly. However, that accessibility also increases the attack surface, allowing adversaries to exploit vulnerabilities like misconfigurations in access permissions. ...

Red teams can proactively address several aspects of AI model theft, such as:

• API attacks
• Side Channel attacks
• Container and Orchestration attacks
• Supply Chain attacks

...

See the full story here: https://www.securityintelligence.com/articles/how-red-teaming-helps-safeguard-the-infrastructure-behind-ai-models/

Microsoft and Anduril partner to salvage military AR project

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Anduril, the California-based defence technology company founded by VR pioneer Palmer Luckey, has entered into an agreement with Microsoft to take control of the troubled military AR projects known as the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS).

IVAS, which began in 2018, is the US Army’s ambitious effort to equip soldiers with augmented reality (AR) headsets designed to enhance situational awareness and decision-making on the battlefield. ...

Microsoft and Anduril announced today that the new partnership will see Anduril “assume oversight of production, future development of hardware and software, and delivery timelines” for IVAS—a shift in roles that will allow Microsoft to step back from hardware development and focus on providing cloud infrastructure and AI support through its Azure platform. The agreement is subject to approval from the US Department of Defense (DoD).   ...

See the full story here: https://iottechnews.com/news/microsoft-and-anduril-partner-salvage-military-ar-project/

What Data-Driven Science Reveals About the Twisted Saga of Western Water Rights

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At Caltech, Laura Taylor, a postdoctoral instructor in the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, conducts data-driven research that combines satellite imagery with historical and economic analysis to point to policy solutions for fairer resource allocation and cleaner water.

Through her work, Taylor has demonstrated that the processes tribes must go through to have their long-established legal rights to water quantified and enforced may actually be contributing to the degradation of this resource. ...

Under the “first in time, first in right” doctrine, a principle of prior appropriation used in Western United States water law, the first person to divert water from a natural source and put it to “beneficial use” secures the legal right to that water. ...

The 1908 US Supreme Court decision in Winters v. United States created a unique category of water rights for Native American tribes that takes precedence over later nontribal appropriations under the “first in time, first in right” principle. Winters recognized that tribal water rights were implicitly reserved by treaties, even if these rights were not explicitly mentioned in the agreements. ...

... Taylor explains. “Out here, not using water is seen as wasting it. That mentality has shaped decades of policy—and it’s a huge part of why water is so scarce today.” ...

Levels of dissolved oxygen—an essential indicator of water health—drop significantly near reservations as legal battles drag on. Pollution worsens upstream of Native American reservations, specifically, where industrial or agricultural runoff can have devastating effects on downstream water users. ...

“The federal government has taken a soft approach to these negotiations,” she says. “But we now have empirical evidence that this delay is actually harming the environment.” ...

See the full story here: https://magazine.caltech.edu/post/western-water-rights-reservations?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=magazine-fall24&utm_source=weekly-newsletter&utm_content=&utm_term=

Thomson Reuters scores early win in AI copyright battles in the US

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The media and technology company filed a lawsuit against Ross Intelligence — a now-defunct legal research firm — in 2020, arguing they had used materials from Thomson Reuters’ own legal platform Westlaw to train an AI model without permission.

Judge Stephanos Bibas of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision Tuesday that affirmed Ross Intelligence was not permitted under U.S. copyright law to use the company’s content in order to build a competing platform. ...

In his summary judgment, Bibas said that “none of Ross’s possible defenses holds water” and ruled in favor of Thomson Reuters on the issue of “fair use.” ...

See the full story here: https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-reuters-4a127c5b7e8bb76c84499fe12ad643c8

Is AI Making Us Dumber?

A new study from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University suggests that over-reliance on generative AI may erode critical thinking skills. In other words: if you don’t use it, you lose it.

Researchers surveyed 319 knowledge workers across 936 AI-assisted tasks and found a troubling trend: the more users trusted AI-generated outputs, the less cognitive effort they applied. Said differently, confidence in AI correlates with diminished analytical engagement.

This is a textbook example of the automation paradox—offloading cognitive tasks to AI can make humans worse at them. Participants who blindly accepted AI’s suggestions reported weaker critical thinking skills, while skeptics remained more analytical, actively refining AI-generated content.

Another key finding: AI-assisted work tends to be more homogenous. Instead of injecting personal insight, many users defaulted to AI-generated solutions, especially under time pressure. Workers in high-stakes roles were more likely to scrutinize AI output, but those facing tight deadlines let AI take the wheel. This is one of my biggest concerns—AI-driven homogeneity could fast-track us to monoculture. ...

Shelly Palmer's 2/11/25 post.

This Is What Big Tech Was Trying to Do to Us at the Super Bowl

... AI, as expressed here, is all about making you feel good. ...

The ads came in a long tradition of what might be called the Super Bowl’s tech-normalization movement, in which frontiers foreign or fraught are made safe by companies introducing them to us at our most guard-down moment: while we snack on chips hanging with friends. From using a Mac in 1984 to shopping online in 2000 to investing in crypto in 2022, our screens on this day are filled with what Silicon Valley wants us to embrace next. 

In 2025 that something is AI, and the message came in emotional packaging that emphasized the utility while downplaying the hazards. It was, to be generous, a mixed bag. ...

See the full story with embedded video of the ads here: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/super-bowl-2025-commercials-ai-artificial-intelligence-technology-1236131819/

Trump’s AI ambition and China’s DeepSeek overshadow an AI summit in Paris

... The event aims to address how to harness artificial intelligence’s potential so that it benefits everyone, while containing the technology’s myriad risks. ...

What’s at stake? 

More than two years after ChatGPT ‘s debut, generative AI continues to make astounding advances at breakneck speed. The technology that powers all-purpose chatbots is transforming many aspects of life with its ability to spit out high-quality text, images or video, or carry out complex tasks. 

The 2023 summit in the U.K. resulted in a non-binding pledge by 28 nations to tackle AI risks. A follow-up meeting hosted by South Korea last year secured another pledge to set up a network of public AI safety institutes to advance research and testing. ...

But this time organizers are expanding the discussion to more countries, and widening the debate to a range of other AI-related topics. Like previous editions, this summit won’t produce any binding regulation. ...

A public-interest partnership named “Current AI” is to be launched with an initial $400 million investment. The initiative aims at raising $2.5 billion over the next five years for the public-private partnership involving governments, businesses and philanthropic groups that will provide open-source access to databases, software and other tools for “trusted” AI actors, according to Macron’s office. ...

“Trump is against the very idea of global governance,” Reiners said. “It’s one thing to get countries to agree that AI should have guardrails and that AI safety is something worth caring about. But they’ve widened the scope to talk about the future of work and the environment and inclusivity and so on — a whole range of concepts. So it’s hard to imagine getting a widespread agreement on such a broad range of subjects.”

See the full story here: https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-france-ai-trump-deepseek-86109ba21f9e3ccc744f23cc74ff8a17#

(MIT Student Profile) Aligning AI with human values

... An MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) scholar, Lorvo looks closely at how AI might automate AI research and development processes and practices. A member of the Big Data research group, she’s investigating the social and economic implications associated with AI’s potential to accelerate research on itself and how to effectively communicate these ideas and potential impacts to general audiences including legislators, strategic advisors, and others. ...

According to Lorvo, companies on AI’s frontier continue to push boundaries, which means we’ll need to implement effective policies that prioritize human safety without impeding research. ...

Lorvo invests her time outside the classroom in creating memorable experiences and fostering relationships with her classmates. “I’m fortunate that there’s space to balance my coursework, research, and club commitments with other activities, like weightlifting and off-campus initiatives,” she says. “There are always so many clubs and events available across the Institute.” ...

See the full story here: https://news.mit.edu/2025/audrey-lorvo-aligning-ai-human-values-0204

Anthropic Challenges Hackers to Jailbreak Its AI Model

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During internal testing, the classifier successfully blocked 95% of 10,000 synthetic jailbreak attempts, compared to just 14% for an unprotected Claude model. However, the system carries a 23.7% computational overhead, increasing costs and energy consumption. It also mistakenly rejects 0.38% of safe queries, a tradeoff Anthropic deems acceptable.

Despite these advancements, Anthropic acknowledges that no AI safety system is foolproof. The company expects new jailbreak methods to emerge but claims its classifier can quickly adapt to novel threats.

From now until February 10, Anthropic is inviting the public to test its defenses by attempting to bypass the class prompt Claude into generating restricted content on chemical weapons. Successful jailbreaks will be disclosed at the end of the test. ...

See the full story here: https://shellypalmer.com/2025/02/anthropic-challenges-hackers-to-jailbreak-its-ai-model/