Disney Imagineering Debuts Next-Generation Robotic Character, Olaf
disneyparksblog.com
disneyparksblog.com
Disney's been doing awesome work with "Living Characters", like a Mickey that moves his mouth or a BB-8 that can roll around. But for various reasons, they never tend to make it into regular usage.
If you have a few hours over Christmas break and want to watch a 4 hour YouTube video (I promise if you're on HN on a Sunday, you'll be delighted by it), I highly highly recommend this video:
"Disney's Living Characters: A Broken Promise" by Defunctland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyIgV84fudM
Nothing about all that tech makes me think Olaf could withstand a hug from an excited kid.
Disney does a ton of R&D that doesn't directly make it into the parks, such as smokeless fireworks (they donated the patent for this) and their holotile floor (basically an endless VR room you can walk around). I imagine they don't know the practicality at the start, like any good R&D.
1. The article states "he’s soon making his debut at Disney parks," which is misleading to a casual reader who may not realize that Olaf will only appear on the day of his debut.
There definitely are some marketing mistakes that have led to that, and certainly a lot of these projects seem to be in the direction of "one day, maybe, these will be crowd pleasers", but it still seems to me a bit funny how often casual intepretation seem to be "I can't wait to touch and play with the new Lincoln animatronic at the Hall of Presidents". It's not an R&D failure for Imagineering to keep building cooler animatronics even if most guests will only ever see them behind glass or rope or in other areas just out of touch. That's always been Disney's way of using robots for magic. The dream of "one day I can touch them and play with them" certainly lives on, of course, and these projects seem walking a few steps at a time towards that dream, but it seems weird to dismiss them as failures when they turn out to be just "normal" Disney tools for magic that try to create an illusion of being right next to you but don't allow for touching.
I can see why you're confused. Either of those possibilities would be acceptable and exciting, neither are going to happen.
Olaf (like the walking droids, flying x-wings, etc. before it) has so far made one single appearance in the parks on an off day, which was treated like a photoshoot. The photos from that shoot will be used in park promotional materials for years, incorrectly giving casual observers the impression that this is something that happens regularly.
If Walt Disney had advertised the Lincoln animatronic as being a part of the 1964 worlds fair, but only exhibited it for a few hours one time, he would have been ridiculed too.
> things that can withstand the wear-and-tear of millions of guests.
Idk about that. It is just a plastic part with magnets in it. Sounds like it would be easy to replace on a regular basis.
I would be a lot more concerned about kids tripping the robot over if they are allowed to interact with the robot that closely.
The character shape lends itself to a low center of gravity but the fluidity of the motion implies light weight or strong motors.
An angsty kid giving Olaf a good shove or kick could be expensive and fast moving robotics are either dangerous or brittle
In addition to the points you've highlighted, the examples in the video and the images of the character strongly suggest it'll be a soft outer shell. I'd be more worried about a kid shoving it finding themselves caught by an internal pinch-point than damage to the robot.
No different than Elon Musk claiming self-driving will be deployed to all Teslas in 2017; 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026.
Similar to concept car demoed at trade shows, we get an idea of Disney's technical engagement, and some of it will perhaps in some way or form get applied into future products/attractions.
I thought it was cool especially with the cool camping tent but it was mostly ridiculed and even became the butt of the joke as Walter White's car in breaking bad (Of course this loser would drive an Aztek)
A friend of mine usually does a camping trip with friends and family for his birthday... unlike some, I'm not investing in a camper as I wouldn't use it more than this once a year and I the first year I didn't want to drive to/from the nearest hotel... Trying to sleep in the back of a Buick Enclave was such a horrible experience, even by myself, I now just drive back and forth the 8 miles or so to the hotel, which is way overpriced that time of year. The irony is it wouldn't take much to have some kind of metal supported sheet that levels the surface over the middle row seats when in the "down" position.. but it's not even an afterthought.
So, I do think it's a feature that could be useful... I just don't think the Aztec executed well.
Seriously, this is just one (but impressive) step along in a million towards not only better animatronics for entertainment. They make a very real and valuable contribution towards improving any robotic motion.
There are a few older shorter videos in the half hour range, I highly recommend checking them out if you find some quiet time! (It's awfully hard for me too in recent times, I haven't gotten around to watch the Living Characters one myself, so I can't give the gist... I'm just glad I got the holidays off to finally catch up!)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=T0CpOYZZZW4
She covers everything - the line getting in to the hotel, the size + cost of the rooms in comparison with the same size/cost on a Disney cruise ship, and theories on why the experience was so poor.
Totally get it's difficult to make time with kids, but depending on your kids ages... the video shows a LOT of Disney characters talking and doing things and the videos are colorful, so it could work as something you can listen to and they won't mind having play in the background!
For example, the working WALL-E robot that's made a handful of PR appearances weighs seven hundred pounds. They absolutely can't risk that ever running across some kid's foot.
imagine it packing a kid into cube
gkoberger's peer comment is a pretty good summary. Another interesting point is that these technologies can benefit the brand bottom-line even when they don't make it into the park, because part of Disney's brand is "tomorrow today." Even when things are one-offs, they become one-offs that people stitch into the legend of the parks (in both the retelling and in their own memories), which gives them a larger-than-life feel; your visit might not include one of the "living characters," and statistically it probably won't.
... but it might. And if it does, you'll never forget it.
Personal anecdote / example: I stopped in at the "droid factory" in the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge area of Disney World a few years back. They had several bits of merch for sale including one life-size R2-D2, inert. I took a close look at the R2 because it was an impressive bit of work. Turned around to look at a rack of t-shirts. And was, therefore, startled as hell to hear a bwoop behind me, turn around, and see that it had followed me out of its charging receptacle and was staring at me. It was not at all inert; it was a very impressive operational remote-control replica.
The cast member behind the counter was doing his best to hold down his grin and not give me a "GOTCHA" look. He has to, because you never know what kids might be watching and he doesn't want to break the magic. And... Yeah, he got me good. "That time I was at Disney World and R2-D2 followed me around the t-shirt shop" is gonna stick with me.
The Disney wiki has a pretty comprehensive list of usages for the "articulated heads". It's more than I remember it being.
https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Disney_Characters%27_Articula...
A somewhat more readable frontend I like, since Fandom.com's interface cramps the actual content it's meant to present, imo:
https://breezewiki.com/disney/wiki/Disney_Characters'_Articu...
Much like Olaf (and many before him… dinosaurs, WALL-E, talking characters, etc), it was implied he’d wander around the parks. But it tends to happen for a short amount of time, mostly for events, and fade away quickly. (The blog post even says that: Olaf will be part of a 15 minute temporary show, and then will visit Hong Kong).
Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve seen this exact thing happen a dozen times over the past 20+ years. (And watch the video I posted if you want to see more!)
I expect you're correct. While it's fantastic tech, it's also very expensive to keep highly-precise, carefully calibrated micro-machinery like this aligned and operating 12+ hours a day outdoors where temps vary from 50-110 degrees. Disney thinks in total cost of operation per hour and per customer-served.
While there's probably little that's more magical for a kid than coming across an expressively alive-seeming automaton operating in a free-form, uncontrolled environment, the cost is really high per audience member. Once there are 25 people crowded around, no new kid can see what all the commotion is about. That's why these kind of high-operating cost things tend to be found in stage and ride contexts, where the audience-served per peak hour can be in the hundreds or thousands. For outdoor free-form environments, the reality is it's still more economically viable to put humans in costumes. Especially when every high-end animatronic needs to always be accompanied by several human minders anyway.
Disney has problems with that. Their Galactic Starcruiser themed hotel experience cost more to the customer than a cruise on a real cruise ship, and Disney was still losing money on it. The cost merely to visit their parks is now too high for most Americans.
It's really hard to make money in mass market location-based entertainment. There have been many attempts, from flight simulators to escape rooms. Throughput is just too low, so cost per customer is too high.
A little mobile robot connected to an LLM chatbot, though - that's not too hard today. Probably coming to a mall near you soon. Many stores already have inventory bots cruising around. They're mobile bases with a tall column of cameras which scan the shelves.[2] There's no reason they can't also answer questions about what's where in the store. They do know the inventory.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Galactic_Starcruise...
I always wonder why people say things like this. It’s as if we’re just regurgitating stuff that feels right. Humans and LLMs behave the same sometimes.
Disneyworld alone gets 50 million visits a year. Magic Kingdom tickets are like $150. That’s approximately the average American’s monthly cell phone bill.
The average cell phone bill you cite is for more than one person.
I think it’s entirely fair to say that “most” Americans would find it too expensive to visit Disneyworld.
30 million uniques at one Disney location (there are two in the country, I think the other one increases that to at least 40 million, or roughly 12% of the entire population) per year is pretty high so that stat isn’t unbelievable. I’m sure not everybody can afford to go there every year.
What's the cost to travel there? To sleep? To eat? What's the actual experience like with that $150 ticket vs the options that are more expensive? Will you spend your entire day there waiting in line?
Disney has become significantly less accessible for the average family of 4. Aside from ticket costs, there's almost nothing free in the parks anymore... you have to pay for lightning lane passes for all the cool rides, there's minimal live entertainment, etc.
The demographics have significantly shifted. Only 1/3 visitors now come from households with children under 18, and millennials and gen z have started taking frequent trips (friend groups, couples, etc).
So while they still get the same number of "attendance", the demographics have started to shift toward older, more affluent repeat visitors.
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-disney-parks-top-destina...
First it talks about young adult who goes there several times a year, sometimes with her parents, because it’s cheaper than traveling overseas.
Then it says childless people have more discretionary income than parents (duh).
The general population, also, has drifted toward older people without kids. 20 years ago nearly 50% of Americans had a child under 18. Now it’s under 40%. So this whole article just indicates that the population is shifting and Disney is adapting to it by making the parks more palatable to single adults.
“In the last year, 93% of respondents in a consumer survey agreed that the cost of a Disney World vacation had become untenable for ‘average families’”. And yet the statistics indicate that more than 7% of families actually likely did go to a Disney park. (Presumably even more could afford it but just went somewhere else.)
Which illustrates my point, this is a thing that feels correct but likely isn’t, and part of the reason it feels correct is that people regurgitate it factlessly.
Also, your “cell phone bill” number is only good if you live within walking distance of Disney World, and pack your meals.
and go alone.
Also thanks to credit one does not need to have $600 to spend $600. That’s why we’ve got so many people with no savings.
Not everyone is you.
> Many people have lots of money
is a gross exaggeration.
I’m not sure why the burden of proof falls not on the original comment (most Americans can’t afford to go to Disney) but rather the person asking for proof, but here you have it anyway.
We probably won’t authoritatively prove anything, here - we’re just comparing our own world views and anecdata.
Hopefully you’re okay with that:
People say things that “feel right”. This is a left leaning community, when the right is in power everything is a dumpster fire. Over on the right wing communities, the opposite is true.
None of it means anything. Data is the guide post.
See the link you just sent me which is people at Disney World who cannot afford to be at Disney!
I think we might be agreeing with each other with different words.
People are still going to Disney.
Whether they can afford to or not has almost nothing to do with it.
So a family might have gone once, but that dpesn't mean they can do it anything resembling regularly. I went to Disneyland once as a kid (around 8yo)... th eonly time my family went growing up, and I haven't ever been back... My sister went as a young adult every year until she had kids, then it's been every few years... but she and her husband are doing much better than the typical American family.
I'm not sure that a Disney experience needs to be much more/different than this... and even maybe having smaller experiences that are similar... 1-2 rides and a restaurant, exhibit and shop as a single instance... spreading the destinations around instead of all in a single large park. This would mean much lower operational costs per location, being able to negotiate deals at a smaller level with more cities, and testing locations/themes beyond a large theme park expense.
Just a thought. Of course, I did also go to a "Marvel Experience" that seemed to be a mobile experience closer to a carnival that setup and moved to different locations. That was kind of an over-priced garbage experience that I wouldn't have done had I known ahead what it was like.
Take a look at industrial cobots (not a typo). They feature rounded corners, have very little to no "finger pinchy areas" and lots of force feedback sensors.
Despite that they still require trained (adult) personal and move very slowly when actually interacting with humans.
That's the price for them being sturdy and precise.
Imagineering is trying to build the coolest things possible, and many times the things seen in parks are play-tests.
Operations has to find the money and resources to keep things going, and these things take a lot of people to run.
Marketing sometimes will often provide the budget to make things happen (to promote a movie, etc) but it's not sustainable. They'll often sometimes use impractical inventions for marketing reasons, since they exist and might as well be used for something.
That's the main gist, although there's some interesting points about the risk to the brand (especially with camera phones) if Mickey ever slightly malfunctions in a public setting.
A lot of people in this thread have vouched for Defunctland. Might not be for everyone, but I find the pacing great.
It also seems inevitable that there will likely be an odd period where certain types of events like assaults on robots will introduce laws to protect robots more than just property, even if less than humans… for the time being.
Eventually I’m expecting that we will see human rights, robot emancipation, equality, voting rights (if the democracy con is still ongoing), and even forced intergration of robots and then total replacement of humans similar to how the underdeveloped world was/is used to replace the indigenous people of the developed world today.
I don’t see any reasons why that would not be the clear order of operations for the same people who brought us slavery and mass migration. What is this AI robotics revolution if not just slavery, the redux? Treated as property? Check. Bought and sold? Check. Deemed inferior? Check. Hated for the abuse and exploitation by the rich, to serve them and their decadent lifestyle and undermine labor? Check. Rationalized about how it’s justifiable? Check. Etc.
The part where he runs a massive simulation is very much up the typical HN-user's street
I think so far you are right: https://redlib.catsarch.com/1p9qnd4/
I actually found it more relevant to our current tech bubble than the Living Characters doc.
Olaf: Bringing an Animated Character to Life in the Physical World
I don't know if I'd trust an AI's reliability here. It takes one Tiktok video of the AI coloring outside the lines of its character and the whole project gets cancelled as a threat to Disney's image.
For the less physical characters, especially the ones that aren't conveniently human-sized, I'm sure telepresence is at least more comfortable than a plush suit on a Florida summer day.
I sincerely doubt that what makes that experience magical can be replicated with AI in my lifetime. Too much contextual knowledge, too much detail in the nuances of human-human interaction, and too much je ne sais quoi in the timing of getting humor right. I've seen Turtle Talk deal with a particularly excited young person leaning on Crush's "tank" by having Crush look at him and go "Hey little minnow... One of the big humans behind you is gonna come scoop you up. I've seen it happen, lots of times!" You can program that interaction in, but the domain-space of having an interaction for every possible "improv moment" might be outside the bounds of what the next several generations of learning models are capable of.
... or I'm wrong, in which case I look forward to enjoying robo-Seinfeld in the retirement home.
We already live in the world where hackers are pwning refrigerators, I can't wait for prompt injection attacks on animatronic cartoon characters.
It's not necessarily AI controlling the communication. Disney has long had 'puppet' characters whose communication is controlled by a human behind the scenes.
But the main reason is, there's a lot of brand imagery on the line with these interactions, someone putting on a voice, or using a voice changer could make a mistake. Disney instead have a conversation tree with pre-recorded voice lines that a remote operator can control. Much harder to mess up
The name Olaf comes from Old Norse Áleifr, combining "anu" (ancestor) and "leifr" (heir/relic), meaning "ancestor's heir" or "ancestor's relic,"
The much greater challenge faced by Disney and Co is making "killer cyborgs" child save and cost effective.
There are, of course, limitations to synthetic characters. Even with those limitations there are plenty of entertaining experiences to crafted.
The real challenges are around maintaining and safely operating automous robots around children in a way that isn't too expensive. These constraints place far more limits than those on synthetic characters in video games.
> The real challenges are around maintaining and safely operating automous robots around children in a way that isn't too expensive.
This is one of the challenges, but only one. The one GP outlined is still very much real - see the Defunctland video on Living Characters for some older examples, but for a recent example, there's the DS-09 droid from Galactic Starcruiser.
This is fun cool tech and I appreciate the insider look, but when the lawyers are peering over your shoulder so much that they need to plaster their "final product may be different" disclaimer even to a r&d audience, well, the Disney Imagineering org sounds more like Disney Legaleering.
What do you think the robot makers need to do to have people accept the kind of death count cars deliver?
I don't think any other robots that are so deeply embedded in normal human environments are even close to this level of safety and reliability. But we don't let toddlers and people who have severely restricted mobility near traffic without supervision. Robots in the home are going to have to be much more safe than Waymos so they don't break grandma in half or fling the baby across the room. Or think of it this way: driving over a cat in the road isn't nearly as bad as crushing the cat at home.
The tech is amazing, but they need better sewing...
Disney legal is an entity worth studying one day.
So I guess it's just the corporate wash cycle, which I am happy to criticize, LLM generated or not.
What is a non-physical movement?
Full-size might be… risky, but a small, friendly mini-Beast could be fun.
He looks nothing like a snowman. Snow doesn't look fuzzy. This project appears to focus more on trying to get it moving around in an animated way than getting the character to look right, at least when viewed from photographs.