On Monday, Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) released the latest episode of its hit series. “we call it imagineeering,” It takes viewers inside Disney’s global research and development efforts that are driving the next wave of innovation. This group represents the very beginning of a development process where Imagineers combine creativity and technology to create ideas for tomorrow’s innovative Disney experiences. This team has worked on some of the most exciting advances at Disney Parks, including interactive attractions, innovative projection systems, and advanced robotic characters.
And in this episode, WDI reveals its latest all-new innovation: the real-life robot character of Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Olaf. frozen movie.
To uncover the latest exciting innovations from Walt Disney Imagineering, we spoke with Kyle Laughlin, Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Walt Disney Imagineering.
Walt Disney himself always made an effort In search of technological innovations that help with storytelling. How is WDI R&D combining creativity and innovation to advance Disney storytelling today?
As with all things Disney, we always start with the story. We think about how we want our guests to feel and what kind of emotional experience we want them to have. Our top priority is building storytelling technology that allows Imagineers to truly bring characters to life. Technology needs to be sufficiently advanced for this to happen. can’t see So guests don’t think about the effort and skill that goes into making something authentic, they just focus on having an emotional experience with the characters they care about.
BDX droids were a significant advancement in the world. advanced robot character Technology — What did you learn while creating?Rather than making a robot just a robot, character?
Disney’s roots are here animation — Using movement to create the illusion of life. Walt did it in his early hand-drawn animated films, Pixar and Disney Animation Studios used it for computer-generated animation, and Imagineering brings physical characters to life through movement and emotion.
The core technology of our platform is deep reinforcement learning, which allows robot characters to learn to imitate motions provided by artists in simulation. This allowed us to iterate between mechanical design and animation very quickly. We are able to achieve this unparalleled level of reliability because we can use physical AI to iterate very quickly and bridge the gap between art and science.
Please tell me about your job you In collaboration with NVIDIA and Google deep mind to Create a simulation framework Newton. how is that allow to robot use Reinforcement learning?
It takes humans years to perfect the motor skills of walking, and even more years of practice to perform acrobatic movements that only a few people can master. Deep reinforcement learning is a technology that helps robots learn such skills more quickly. For example, a BDX droid or Olaf learns to walk in a stylized way in the physical world. Proper scaling of this technology requires fast and parallel simulations.
Together with our partners at NVIDIA and Google DeepMind, we are working on a new open source simulation framework called Newton. At the core of Newton are building blocks that enable rapid development of graphics processing unit (GPU)-accelerated simulators. One of our contributions to this framework is a simulator called Kamino, which unlocks the potential of reinforcement learning for robotic systems of unparalleled complexity. This helps us take a big step forward in our mission to build robot characters that behave exactly like the characters we know from the movies.
Tell us about the wonderful Orr.AF robberyear character. how robot-kunTake advantage of the breakthrough advances in BDX droids and then… Create beyond innovation character it’s not intended to appear as a robot?
BDX droids and the newest Olaf bring stories and emotions to life through their movements and interactions with guests. However, the BDX droid in the movie is literally a robot character. Olaf is a much more difficult animated character to bring to life in the physical world. To make Olaf move as faithfully as possible, we made fundamental additions to our reinforcement learning framework, making the character more believable by allowing him to move at the limits of the hardware. Olaf wears a “snow” costume that deforms and moves differently than the BDX droid’s hard shell, with a fully movable mouth, eyes, and (removable) carrot nose. And best of all, Olaf can talk and have conversations.
What are the unique challenges when creating robot’s shapes Is it based on an anime character? How did you innovate to address those challenges?
When bringing animated characters to life through advanced robotics, the most important thing is to stay true to the filmmaker’s vision for the character. Translating these characters from the screen to the real world requires pushing the boundaries of not only technology but creativity. We want to bring these characters to life in ways our guests have never imagined but never seen before. Our latest Olaf is a great example of how to bring an animated character to life in the physical world as faithfully as possible. This is a difficult task because animated characters often move in non-physical ways. For example, to make Olaf’s snowball legs move along his body, we combined cutting-edge deep reinforcement learning with advances in artistic interface and machine design.
How do you think the groundbreaking results achieved with Olaf will be applied to future innovations??
What’s so exciting is that we’re just getting started. The BDX droid, self-balancing Harvey, and the newest Olaf all represent an increased level of performance and innovation in bringing Disney characters to life through advanced robotics. The speed with which we can create new characters and bring them to our guests is unprecedented. We are working to expand even further, bringing even more emotional, expressive and surprising characters to guests in our parks and ships around the world.
