This is cool, but it will almost definitely never end up in a park, outside of some promotional situations.
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:
I watched a bit of this with my 8 year old and he kept asking to come back to it over the week. We watched the entire thing and he kept bringing up interesting thoughts and had good questions. Felt like it was his first “wow this lecture is actually super interesting” experience.
It’s not as technically impressive, but my toddler was very impressed by the R2D2 that was making its rounds in the park. Not part of a show; you could go right up to it. Probably the only character where the theme park robot is really indistinguishable from the real thing.
A lot of it just seems to be marketing. Present the shiny new toy, get the news headlines, people book their stays, and then it doesn't really matter if they ever actually make it into the parks.
"There is no point in research, because I do not see anything useful being mass-produced immediately after". It's like saying Gaussian elimination is wasteful because it is just doing some cool magic with numbers that don't mean anything. That could not possible be used for anything real, right?
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.
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.
The only thing worse than not getting the concept car, is getting the concept card after it’s been through the development cycle. Pontiac Aztek comes to mind as an example
I thought that, aside from being among the least visually appealing mass-produced cars in history, the Aztek was pretty well received -- basically an early version of the "the American lusts for some combination of a Gremlin and a Wagoneer" idea
Eh, maybe. I have a less myopic view... I think their Imagineers just like pushing the envelope, and there's a difference between awesome tech vs things that can withstand the wear-and-tear of millions of guests.
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.
Each time they trot out one of these new robots they strongly imply, if not outright promise, that they will become part of the parks[1], that's the problem. Things like HoloTile are accurately marketed which makes me believe it's a choice they're making with the character robots.
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.
> things that can withstand the wear-and-tear of millions of guests.
In the video, one of the presenters removes and reattaches Olaf's nose. The robot laughs and loves it. I thought to myself, how many kids tearing at that wear item will this survive? I think the answer is significantly less than the thousands of kids who are expected to see this attraction every day.
The removable nose is a power move from the engineers who built the thing. You cannot possibly believe that the animatronic contribution here is 100% contingent on a carrot?
4 hours is an awfully big investment... Especially for those of us with multiple young kids and who no longer own their own free time. Care to give the gist?
Defunctland is genuinely amazing and always a fun watch, and I never regret the time spent on their videos, they're kind of like a special occasion... though they're getting incredibly long... :)
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!)
and for anyone with 4 hours to kill... here's as an incredible documentary covering the misaligned incentives and poor guest experience at the now-shuttered Disney Star Wars hotel.
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.
Just from your description, I know this is Jenny Nicholson. I agree it is an incredibly insightful breakdown and analysis of why it failed, all while being funny and engaging.
One of the key reasons is that it would be really, really easy to accidentally injure parkgoers with any design big enough to interact with and engineered well enough to be reliable in a full day of appearances.
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.
The basic gist is that while the tech is cool, it just ends up being impractical for regular use in the parks. (But like the other poster mentioned, with Defunctland it's less about the tldr and more about the journey and fascinating segues he takes)
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!
And if you'd like an entertaining a history of early AI and robotics, half as long, check out the prequel "Disney Animatronics: A Living History" https://youtu.be/jjNca1L6CUk
I actually found it more relevant to our current tech bubble than the Living Characters doc.
They literally sell BB-8 toys that can roll around and say on the blog that the Olaf robot is coming to Disneyland Paris and special appearances at Disneyland Hong Kong.
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!)
> But it tends to happen for a short amount of time, mostly for events
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.
while I haven't seen them at parks (I just don't make it to any), I have seen them at Star Wars events at my local MiLB team - BB-8 in the size of your video, somewhat interactive and autonomous, same with R2D2. there's usually a human nearby to monitor it, but they're definitely around.
R2D2 is an example of one that you can buy in the gift shop (for $20k!) that was promised to make it into the park but just comes out highly supervised, occasionally.
I could see it being used in parks while also being protected by ushers, kind of like how some of the characters that require larger costumes have minders and protectors.
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.
They have walking droids in Galaxys Edge right now. No ones kicking them over. Olaf is coming to the parks and they will have handlers next to them. It wont be just free-roaming.
I worked with someone who had previously worked on park robotics, and apparently they had to guarantee that the character could not injure a child to be able to put them in parks - a particularly high barrier to actually doing so.
One look at Olaf's hands alone make that an impossible thing to guarantee. Those stick fingers will eventually poke a kid in the eye if kids are allowed to get close to the character. If they gave him a small intimate stage, or roped off area, to do some act or crowd work that would be more ideal/less risky.
Then they will break and wear off quite fast I imagine.
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.
I still remember an experience as a kid decades ago, either at Epcot or with the Sony quasi-museum in NYC, where they had an apparently robotic greeter with a personality, who after five minutes you deciphered was actually an improv comic running a telepresence robot.
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.
> 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.
They're already using similar tech for the Mickey meet and greets and the Galaxy's Edge stormtroopers. The details aren't public, but it seems to be a mix of complex dialogue trees with interrupts or context switches, controlled in real time by the actor or operator.
It's not even complex, just some pre-recorded lines that the character can trigger via finger movements. You can want them do it and it becomes very obvious.
That's interesting; if you're doing human in the loop, I would have thought it'd be easier to just do voice swapping. Or did the technology not quite line up?
Someones linked in this thread the Defunctland video essay on these characters that I highly recommend watching since it goes into this in detail.
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
Sometimes the idea of a killer cyborg with a hulking physique and Austrian accent seems absurd. And then we realize the most advanced robots will be made by entertainment companies.
We already have stationary or wheeled/tracked "killer cyborgs" that can easily eeeh terminate anything within their reach and it seems like bipedals are well on their way.
The much greater challenge faced by Disney and Co is making "killer cyborgs" child save and cost effective.
Arguably entertainment requires a much larger range of precision actions that the robot must be able to accomplish, while being in a less controlled environment. That's the cutting edge.
It's a reasonably cheap and unlocked handheld with fecent battery life. Personally I'd want more pixels, but if it works it works. It seems to be the default choice for remote control these days.
You could build one today! Lots of hard problems around a proper humanoid form, but if you're cool with wheels it would be pretty easy to hook up a little robot to GPT.
Look up VLA models; that's essentially plugging the guts of a language model into a transformer that handles joint motion/vision. They get trained on "episodes" i.e. videos from the PoV of a robot doing a task, after training you can ask the model things like: "pick up the red ball and put it into the green cup" etc. Really cool stuff.
It's a corporate feel that comes from a professional setting and lots of risk aversion. That is exactly what LLMs tend to write, so I sometimes catch myself feeling the "LLM ick" but the article was from before the boom.
So I guess it's just the corporate wash cycle, which I am happy to criticize, LLM generated or not.
Really neat, and made me realize we are getting close to having these type of cute robots at home. With LLMs and voice they would be pretty entertaining companions for many people.
>From the way he moves to the way he looks, every gesture and detail is crafted to reflect the Olaf audiences have seen in the film
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_rjBWmc1iQ
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.
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
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!
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.
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...
[2] https://www.simberobotics.com/store-intelligence/tally
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
Olaf: Bringing an Animated Character to Life in the Physical World
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16705
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L8OFMTteOo
The tech is amazing, but they need better sewing...
Disney legal is an entity worth studying one day.
Full-size might be… risky, but a small, friendly mini-Beast could be fun.
So I guess it's just the corporate wash cycle, which I am happy to criticize, LLM generated or not.
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.