Tech Explained: How Disney Imagineers are using AI and robotics to reshape the company’s theme parks – Fast Company Middle East in Simple Terms

With last weekend’s opening of World of Frozen in the renamed Disney Adventure World park, Paris became the new leader in advanced technology among the company’s theme parks. It’s a title that shifts hands frequently, but with its robotic Olaf and a new nighttime show that blends airborne and water drones with fountains, fire, and water walls, Adventure World is a technological marvel.

Disney tends to downplay the focus on technology in its park attractions. Workers and executives at Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) see the technology as a way to evoke emotion, their primary goal. And with a growing arsenal of tools at their disposal, from AI to powerful game engines (along with plenty of homegrown methods), all of the parks have a lot of ways to summon feelings from guests.

Disneyland Paris has an additional advantage up its sleeve: It sits just a few hours from Disney’s R&D hub in Zurich, where much of the company’s robotics work is happening.

That proximity helped shape the new Olaf. The project began with StellaLou, a theme-park-exclusive character popular in Asia, whose ballerina persona led the team to build a robot capable of a full pirouette. But Imagineers decided she wouldn’t resonate as broadly as Olaf, so they shifted the work onto a more widely recognized character and kept pushing the technology forward.

Homecoming

The Olaf robot shares the same distinctive walk and mannerisms as he does in the Frozen films. He’s the latest advance from the division that was the birthplace of the BDX droids that debuted two years ago (and now are appearing at most of the company’s parks) and the real-world Herbie robot inspired by Fantastic Four.

He represents more than a shift from the audio animatronics the company is famous for. He’s also emblematic of a new type of thinking at Disney Imagineering.

That shift starts at the top. Bruce Vaughn was named president and chief creative officer of Walt Disney Imagineering three years ago. Before that, he spent 22 years as an Imagineer, taking a seven-year break between stints with the company to explore the entrepreneurial world. Once he was lured back to Disney, he says, he brought the startup culture with him.

“We’ve actually culturally shifted Imagineering by . . . celebrating anybody who finds opportunities and creates opportunities,” he tells Fast Company. “Just because we’ve spent 74 years . . . doing things one way, that doesn’t mean it’s the best way, especially given [the] new tools.”

And make no mistake, Disney is leaning into those tools heavily.

AI and Imagineering

AI critics might cringe at the thought of the technology being incorporated into the very heart of Disney’s experiential creativity unit. Vaughn says it has served as a tremendous asset for his team, but only as a supplement to the team’s inherent creativity.

“We did a side-by-side test internally to see if AI could generate anything that we would build,” he says. “It sparked ideas. Then, when we went one step further and we put it in the hands of someone who can actually sketch and draw, they at first were like, ‘I don’t know if this would be useful.’ Very quickly, they were like, ‘Oh my god, what I can do now in days used to take me months.’”

The tech industry is currently facing supply chain issues with RAM and tremendous demand for GPU chips, which is threatening to slow the progress of some AI companies. Vaughn, though, says Disney’s unique position in the entertainment and technology worlds minimizes those industry headaches.

“We have a very tight relationship with Jensen [Huang, CEO of Nvidia], quite frankly,” Vaughn says. “I think it’s partly because of the competitive advantage that we have at Disney and Imagineering.”

Reinforcement Learning

For Olaf and other robotics, AI has been especially useful. To ensure Olaf doesn’t fall flat on his snowy face while ambling around, Imagineers relied on reinforcement learning, an AI-driven tool that lets robotic units make optimal decisions through trial and error. It’s a way for AI to learn without having to constantly tweak programming—and without it, Disney’s robotics unit wouldn’t be anywhere close to where it is now.

Over the long term, says Kyle Laughlin, SVP of Walt Disney Imagineering R&D, the advances you’re seeing with robotics will be incorporated into newer animatronics on rides.

“Our robotic characters and our animatronic characters are going to begin to merge,” he says.

Most animatronics are bolted to the ground, but there’s a growing interest at Disney in expanding their range of motion. For example, an animatronic of founder Walt Disney unveiled at Disneyland in California last year takes a few steps onstage in his show. And there are plenty of Star Wars droids that would be hard to re-create in a character costume.

The future of Olaf

Olaf, for now, appears only at World of Frozen in Paris and Hong Kong. And visitors might be upset to learn that at present, they’ll primarily see him at a show in the lagoon of both parks. Kids who want to give him a warm hug won’t get the opportunity. That’s not expected to be permanent, though.

“He’s so popular that we have to ensure, both from a security perspective as well as an operational one, that we can ease him into the park,” Laughlin says. “You’ll absolutely see him roaming the park in the future.”

Will there be meet and greets with Olaf?

“Yes. I mean, absolutely yes,” he says. “The North Star goal that we have is to be able to have that huggable moment.”

Olaf won’t remain geographically inconvenient for Americans, either. Just as it did with its BDX droids, which started at one park and spread, Imagineering plans to roll out Olaf robots to parks and cruise ships globally, though there’s no timeline for that just yet.

“He’s one of our most popular characters, so domestically you’ll also see him as well,” says Laughlin. “That’s really kind of the important point: We really are building these now for operations, and to ensure that they’re everywhere.”

Expect more robots as well. A Lion King area is currently under construction at Disney Adventure World—and putting people in a lion costume could be underwhelming. Laughlin also mused about the possibility of a robotic Sven, Kristof’s reindeer companion in Frozen.

From their early days in the Tiki Room and the Carousel of Progress, robotics have been a critical part of Disney’s competitive advantage in the theme park space. With the rollout of these new robotic characters, the company is looking to stay at the head of the pack.

“All of our innovation [follows] a planned, critical path where it goes into the product,” Vaughn says. “It isn’t just, ‘Hey, we’re an experiment. Maybe we’ll end up doing something.’ We literally commit to an early idea. And since we can move much more quickly now, based on our relationships with companies like Nvidia and Unreal Engine, we can move an order of magnitude faster.”