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Has there ever been a person who has watched a Disney film and didn’t imagine what it would be like to meet one of the characters in real life? Well, we’re now one step closer to this reality, as visitors to Hong Kong Disneyland Resort will get to meet a self-walking, free-roaming Olaf starting from early May.
This fan-favourite comedic snowman from Frozen has been brought to life by Walt Disney’s Imagineering Research & Development team using next-generation robotics. This isn’t just your run-of-the-mill, remote-controlled puppet either. Working with character animators to ensure expressive movements that are true to the characters on-screen, Disney’s Imagineers have built impressive new robots that can travel steadily on different terrain, adapt to their surroundings, and interact with park guests.
The Olaf robot has already debuted in Disneyland Paris in late March this year, and can be seen as part of a daily show that takes place on a boat in a lagoon. Using a specially built GPU-accelerated simulator called Kamino and reinforcement learning, Olaf was trained to stand and walk in challenging environments – in this case, on board a moving boat – and the robot took only mere hours to learn to navigate on the unsteady surface by itself.
In Hong Kong Disneyland, we don’t have this show, so our Olaf has presumably learned how to walk through the World of Arendelle zone, greeting and interacting with visitors. We can’t wait to see how well this curious, silly snowman with his top-heavy waddle translates offscreen and into real life. Supposedly, Disney Research Hub has also been teaching its robots how to fall – softly, so it doesn’t damage vital components, and also in a stylised manner to appear humorous – but let’s all promise each other to not push Olaf around when we see him!
Disney has long been working on autonomous characters, such as the previous iteration of this technology in its BDX droids, and we can’t wait to one day see worldwide Disneyland parks filled with free-roaming characters.
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