Mechanical Characterization of Structured Sheet Materials

This is why they need to be very well versed in material science, and do their own research.

IIRC they also research optics, color perception, and a lot of related subjects directly applicable to rendering realistic (or controllably non-realistic) images.

They need a diverse range of aesthetic designs that are structurally sound. Some structures in Disney are very unique, the first one that comes to mind is the Epcot ball. I can also see this material application being used in their animatronics possibly(jurassic world trex comes to mind). Other use cases might be nonload bearing walls and fences, there are a lot of walls in disney

It might also be needed for realistic physics rendering for pixar as well but I might be wrong though. First thing that comes to mind is the movie Cars and crash simulations on materials with this wall type.

They might have use cases for building souvenirs with these type of items. Disney imports a lot of stuff overseas and has a large number of facilities for JIT staging and manufacturing for custom things like specialty stamped glassware souvenirs coffee mugs etc. Those are done locally, at least thats what Universal Studios does

I might be wrong here too but they might want intentional deformation for reasons i do not know about. It could be for visual safety reasoms as well, you place this material adjacent to something load bearing. Similarly how civil engineers will put an elastic material on a broken wall to observe crack deformation. Youngs modulus on a sheet of metal of similar gauge thickness is going to be always higher than what these materials offer. Money is not an issue with disney at all.

Im not entirely sure if they intend to make 3D structures with this, or use laser sintering to build custom composite alloys with these materials. They are using finite element analysis with a combination of statistics to make these models.

There might be actual cost saving reasons behind these materials. Or it might be faster manufacturing and prototyping for small animatronics, they need lots of those in short time frames. Those materials are most likely laser sintered which is kind of like 3D printing which is used often in mechanical shops for prototypes. 3D printing plastic offers no elasticity deformation generally

Other things that come to mind with these materials. Cutting board mats, bracelets, mats, polygons, shape memory alloys (heat it up to change its shape), balls, necklaces, board games, yoyos, string games, anything you can 3D print, clothing, cosplay (e.g. lots of disney starwars stormtroopers), build you own mini deathstar kits (usually prelasered sheets of metal you fold), gundam model kits or similar, legos. Those are just some applications for souvenirs disney might use with it

Then again, they might speculate on them becoming related.

It seems like a very "new tech" (a la Google, Facebook, Amazon) approach to me.