Disney has unveiled a new animatronic in the form of carrot-nosed snowman Olaf frozen Series of films. The robotic character will roam the streets of the upcoming World of Frozen (coming soon to Adventure World at Disneyland Paris) and make a “special appearance for a limited time in World of Frozen at the Hong Kong Disneyland Resort,” Disney wrote on its parks blog.
Olaf, seen in prototype form in a 30-minute Disney video, can walk on his little snowball legs, make realistic expressions and talk to visitors. During the video, Disney Imagineering Paris executive Michel den Dalk removes and replaces the robot’s nose and arm, something park visitors will also be able to do.
To help Olaf appear authentic and cartoon-like in his movements, the Imagineering team used AI reinforcement learning. Disney said this allowed them to teach the robot to walk and make “graceful” movements in a much shorter amount of time than it would have taken to program it manually. The fact that Olaf’s exterior is soft, snow-like helps them “fully articulate his mouth, eyes, and removable carrot nose and arms.”
The timing of the announcement is very strange considering this idle landThe amusement park history site, recently released a four-hour YouTube documentary about the broken promises of Disney’s animatronics. The main point was that Disney has announced many such characters, but they are only shown at certain special events before they are removed, like westworld basementNever to be seen again.
Some examples of this are the Wall-E robot in the aughts and, more recently, Groot and star wars The droids they served primarily served as marketing material for Disney, as they would only appear in the parks for specific tests and then disappear. Disney also created a robot called Big Dino that stood 13 feet tall and weighed 11,000 pounds – though it would probably be best not to have one walking around the parks greeting visitors.
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