Ferren led the Disney Imagineering R&D group as Senior
Vice President, then Executive Vice President, before eventually becoming
President of R&D and Creative Technology for Disney, and head of technology
for the company for 10 years. According to his former boss, CEO Michael Eisner,
Ferren's mission was "to dream about the future and show us new and
innovative ways to tell stories". Starting in 1993, he was the first
corporate executive to receive the now-common job title of "Creative
Technology", indicating responsibility for both creative and technical
domains. The idea to create the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, and
its name (derived from Ferren's title at Disney), originated from discussions
with US Army leadership (four-star general Paul J. Kern) on how to gain access
to Hollywood entertainment industry expertise in high-technology areas such as
computer-based Modeling & Simulation, and Virtual Reality.
Ferren supported Disney's Strategic Planning Group and had
direct involvement in a wide variety of design and technology projects for
Disney Theme Parks, such as the Tower of Terror ride, the Test Track by General
Motors, the Indiana Jones Adventure, the Virtual Reality Animation Studio, and
many ABC Television projects. His team was responsible for engineering the ABC
Times Square Studios armored electronic-dimming soundproof window systems, and
curved LED ticker display.
In 1996, Ferren created the Disney Fellows Program which
attracted some of the brightest minds in Computer Science, including Alan Kay,
Marvin Minsky, and Seymour Papert, as well as astronaut Story Musgrave. The
first Disney fellow was parallel-computing pioneer Hillis with whom Ferren went
on to found technology innovation and design firm Applied Minds in 2000.
Applied Minds is now headquartered in Burbank, California, a few miles from
Imagineering headquarters. In 1997 Ferren and the Disney fellows were profiled
in a major article in The New Yorker, by David Remnick, and in many other
publications and news service including Bloomberg, and Newsweek.
In the 90's, Ferren's research group at Disney developed
many pioneering concepts, and produced demonstrations of these ideas and technologies,
to familiarize Disney corporate leadership of their potential to transform the
entertainment industry. These included gaming box platforms, personal
navigators, electronic books, theater-scale digital cinema, direct on-demand
music and video delivery to the home via telephone networks (pre World Wide Web
& broadband), interactive cable television, safe browsing concepts for
kids, and hybrid on-line/theme park concepts.
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