Standing on a crate inside Walt Disney Studios Stage 1 is Rocket from Guardians of the Galaxy. He’s talking with a crowd of people wearing the same ordinary-looking sunglasses that I am, and is larger than life, speaking with full-body movements and natural gestures.

Then I take off the glasses, and I can see that Rocket was on a screen, not an animatronic figure standing on the physical crate. When Rocket stops moving, out from behind a curtain — Wizard of Oz-style — steps an actor who’s been doing all the movements and voice work on Rocket’s behalf.

I could wear these glasses all day and never know there’s anything out of the ordinary about them. They’re regular sunglasses when you’re outdoors, before transforming into XR glasses when you look at a special screen.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

The LED screen technology and glasses come from Liminal Space, a startup selected as part of the 2025 Disney Accelerator Program. Starting out by providing AR experiences at music concerts, Liminal Space creates display systems with microLED chip technology. This produces holographic 3D displays used for everything from stadiums and arenas to smaller spaces like attractions and galleries.

During a Demo Day event at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank in November, Liminal Space co-founder and CEO Nathan Huber explains on-screen that he wanted to improve on how virtual reality is a «solo, isolating experience» because you’re wearing a hulking headset alone, and all you can see is the display. You can’t share it with the people around you.

«We can give you that same level of immersion and awe [as VR], but you can now see your friends and family … and do it all for one to 10,000 people at the same time,» Huber says in the Demo Day video, describing a world where things are «augmented by digital enhancements all around you.»

Liminal Space’s sunglasses are a little closer to augmented reality (AR) than they are to VR, as well as a huge step up from old-school 3D glasses that are currently used in theme parks. 

Whereas VR — like Apple’s Vision Pro and Meta’s Quest 3 — requires a headset and drops you into a fully virtual world, AR overlays the real world with graphics. Smart glasses, like Meta’s Ray-Bans (which Disneyland has already been experimenting with), use AR to overlay information over the real world, as well as providing camera-recording functions and phone connectivity.

As theme parks compete with one another to provide their guests with the most immersive atmosphere possible, Disney’s backing of Liminal Space shows it’s interested in adding more hyperrealistic screens to its parks.

How realistic are these XR visuals?

After Rocket steps away, the Liminal Space demo screen takes us through the world of Avatar, showcasing landscapes from the upcoming sequels (no photos allowed). We soar through thick green vegetation, pulsating trees, floating cliffs, neon flowers and flying reptiles.

«The quality of the visuals — it is bright, it is crisp, I am seeing details in this footage that I’ve never seen before,» Leslie Evans, executive Imagineer at Walt Disney Imagineering R&D, says in the video. «People painstakingly rendered these scenes, and if that’s happened, I want you to see every detail. I want the contrast to be top-notch, I want you to feel like it’s real.»

It does feel as real as 3D and VR can: Everyone gasps as we reach a summit in the Avatar world and tilt forward, «falling» down into the rainforest below. Despite these dizzying heights, it’s somehow less nauseating than strapping on a full VR headset and gazing into another reality. Maybe it’s because you can still see the real world around you, or because you’re not wearing a heavy headpiece.

Leaving aside the comparisons to VR and AR, these glasses offer a far more sophisticated version of the screens on the Avatar Flight of Passage ride at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Florida, especially with those new Avatar visuals I experienced. Liminal Space’s sunglasses are the next step up from those awkward, plasticky sets handed to you at the start of rides and shows like PhilharMagic and Toy Story Mania — the ones you’re told not to wear until the show starts, and that only really work if you’re looking dead straight at the screen and position them just right — with the idea being that you could walk around comfortably in them all day and have them work everywhere. 

This seems to be what Disney intends to do with the technology (Disney tells me it’s still exploring possibilities and doesn’t have anything to share just now). The glasses do double duty, both as sunglasses and whenever you come into contact with a screen at an attraction or while strolling through a land. 

Modular screens throughout theme parks?

The Liminal Space glasses also work from multiple viewing angles while looking at screens, which helps create the feeling of total immersion.

Michael Koperwas, supervisor of Creative Development and Digital Design at Industrial Light & Magic — the famed visual effects studio founded by Star Wars creator George Lucas in the 1970s — spoke about using modular screens from Liminal Space for park experiences.

«All of these different screens create these low-friction, wonderful ways to expand the world that you’re already in,» Koperwas says during the Disney Demo Day showcase video. «Having a modular display like that is essential to creating these locations that feel seamless, feel magical, feel wonderful, and are just full of surprises.»

The company’s glasses are cheap to make, Liminal Space says, meaning theme parks could easily provide thousands of pairs to guests, who could even leave with them at the end of the day and bring them back for their next visit.

It wouldn’t be Disney’s first park wearable: In 2013, Disney introduced the MagicBand for guests to buy and wear at Walt Disney World, allowing them to swipe the band to enter parks and their hotel rooms, and to pay for merchandise and food. The MagicBand Plus added more functionality and came to Disneyland in 2022.

At Liminal Space’s demo, I switch from black-framed sunglasses to white ones and walk into the next room. It has an enormous circular screen showing Impressionist artworks, fading out of one and into the next. A gargantuan Vincent Van Gogh stares at me, inviting me to step inside his Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat. The image shifts to Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and the soft saffron petals curl out toward me.

The image changes again, and this time I’m not just looking at a centuries-old painting — I’m standing in a European street as snow falls around me. Like a child watching a 3D movie for the first time, I can’t help but reach out to try to touch the drifting snowflakes. Through the Liminal Space sunglasses, they’re moving all around me. 

And unlike those traditional 3D glasses you’d wear to watch a show in Disneyland, where the image doesn’t appear to be any closer if you move closer to the screen, Liminal Space’s demo feels like you’re stepping into the video itself. As I walk slowly closer to the falling snow, it begins to fall around me, moving into my peripheral vision as well as in front of me.

Walt Disney Imagineering wants to give park guests immersive experiences like these that don’t just feel like looking at a TV, says Jody Gerstner, executive of Show Systems at Walt Disney Imagineering. 

«Because the circular [screen] performs so well with this bright an image, and because the filter gives you an unfettered view when you move your eyes back and forth, it could be a big win in our guest quality,» Gerstner says in the Demo Day video.

Speaking to a packed theater, Bonnie Rosen, general manager of Disney Accelerator, says the whole point, whether it’s AI, 3D printing or VR, is creating imagination that comes to life. 

«Innovation happens every day at Disney,» she says. «This company lives and breathes creativity. We just don’t talk about it until it looks inevitable, and then someone calls it ‘Disney magic.'»