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Disney's Newest Animatronic Robots Get a 'Level of Intelligence' to Make Their Own Decisions (yahoo.com) 49

Posted by EditorDavid from the wishing-on-stars dept.
"Are You Ready for Sentient Disney Robots?" asks a headline at the New York Times. (Alternate URL here for a text-only version.)

"A new trend that is coming into our animatronics is a level of intelligence," a senior Imagineering executive tells the Times, showing off Disney's sophisticated new three-foot animatronic of the Guardians of the Galaxy character Groot. "This guy represents our future. It's part of how we stay relevant."

The animatronic Groot walked across the room to introduce himself to the Times' reporter. When I remained silent, his demeanor changed. His shoulders slumped, and he seemed to look at me with puppy dog eyes. "Don't be sad," I blurted out. He grinned and broke into a little dance before balancing on one foot with outstretched arms.
It's just part of a larger initiative to upgrade the park's tech in a variety of different ways: There are animatronics at Disney World that have been doing the same herky-jerky thing on loop since Richard Nixon was president. In the meantime, the world's children have become technophiles, raised on apps (three million in the Google store), the Roblox online gaming universe and augmented reality Snapchat filters... In early June, Disney's animatronic technology took a sonic leap forward. The Disneyland Resort's newest ride, WEB Slingers: A Spider-Man Adventure, features a "stuntronic" robot (outfitted in Spidey spandex) that performs elaborate aerial tricks, just like a stunt person. A catapult hurls the untethered machine 65 feet into the air, where it completes various feats (somersaults in one pass, an "epic flail" in another) while autonomously adjusting its trajectory to land in a hidden net... The Spider-Man robot — 95 pounds of microprocessors, 3-D printed plastic, gyroscopes, accelerometers, aluminum and other materials — took more than three years to develop. Disney declined to discuss the cost of the stuntronics endeavor, but the company easily invested millions of dollars...

One of Disney's senior roboticists, Scott LaValley, came from Boston Dynamics, where he contributed to an early version of Atlas, a running and jumping machine that inspires "how did they do that" amazement — followed by dystopian dread. Disney said it had no plans to replace human performers... Rather, Disney's newest robotics initiative is about extreme Marvel and "Star Wars" characters — huge ones like the Incredible Hulk, tiny ones like Baby Yoda and swinging ones like Spider-Man — that are challenging to bring to life in a realistic way, especially outdoors.... The development of Groot — code-named Project Kiwi — is the latest example. He is a prototype for a small-scale, free-roaming robotic actor that can take on the role of any similarly sized Disney character....

Cameras and sensors will give these robots the ability to make on-the-fly choices about what to do and say. Custom software allows animators and engineers to design behaviors (happy, sad, sneaky) and convey emotion.
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Disney's Newest Animatronic Robots Get a 'Level of Intelligence' to Make Their Own Decisions More

Disney's Newest Animatronic Robots Get a 'Level of Intelligence' to Make Their Own Decisions

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  • Disney wants relevance,stop corrupting copyright (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I wouldn't touch anything Disney does with a ten foot pole, what a bunch of evil exploitive people, hey you upper class jerks, shame on you for ripping off all the rest of us.

  • its all fun and games till a disney character pushes you over a ledge "a be di be di thats all folks!!!"

  • Terrible ride (Score:3)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Monday August 23, 2021 @06:57AM (#61719939)
    I just watched a YouTube video of that webslingers ride and it is awful - a small ride with a moving track and a few 3D screens where people flail their arms to shoot webs at the action. I don't know where the animatronic is supposed to be but I it is launched outside. Certainly more interesting than the ride itself.

    • I just watched a YouTube video of that webslingers ride and it is awful - a small ride with a moving track and a few 3D screens where people flail their arms to shoot webs at the action. I don't know where the animatronic is supposed to be but I it is launched outside. Certainly more interesting than the ride itself.

      I've been on it - it's actually pretty cool how they use motion tracking on multiple riders per vehicle and let the riders "aim" without interacting with any devices. Disney also sells add-ons that can be worn by the riders to change the way the game works. Clever, IMHO....

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        The problem is that now, for about the price of two tickets to Disney you can get a VR headset that can do this at home to keep, complete with the no-controller hand tracking or pretty good controllers. Except you can actually look around instead of only having a screen to mess with. It also looks like they roll you from screen to screen without any real point. The ride doesn't appear to have any 'fun' movement, just casually ferrying you from one screen to another, when just the one screen would have done

        • The problem is that now, for about the price of two tickets to Disney you can get a VR headset that can do this at home to keep, complete with the no-controller hand tracking or pretty good controllers. Except you can actually look around instead of only having a screen to mess with. It also looks like they roll you from screen to screen without any real point. The ride doesn't appear to have any 'fun' movement, just casually ferrying you from one screen to another, when just the one screen would have done.

          It seems even worse than the 'rides' where you sit in a theater and the chairs use some hydraulics to lean you around in some way coordinated with the on-screen action. At least that has some physical movement that you can't reasonably install at home that is vaguely interesting.

          Disney Imagineering is always looking for people who have better ideas. Consider applying and tell them all the ways things can be better.
          Meanwhile, queues to get into their rides continue to be lengthy all day long each and every day. ;-)
          Bear in mind their attractions are years in the making. Keep an eye on their patent portfolio to see what kind of nifty ideas they are working on.

          But seriously, I have an Oculus. It's fun and my kids enjoy it, but it's not in the same league as the Spiderman ride, or the T

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )
        I'm sure it has innovation but is it really more fun than (for example) MIB Alien Attack or Toy Story Mania? They have a similar idea where you shoot stuff but you're on a real ride with real targets. I was looking at this Webslinger thing and it was literally just a row of screens and people wearing 3d glasses waving their arms around like a terrible kinect game. They might as well foregone the ride element entirely because it served no purpose.

        I was mainly watching it to see where this stunt bot would f

        • I'm sure it has innovation but is it really more fun than (for example) MIB Alien Attack or Toy Story Mania? They have a similar idea where you shoot stuff but you're on a real ride with real targets. I was looking at this Webslinger thing and it was literally just a row of screens and people wearing 3d glasses waving their arms around like a terrible kinect game. They might as well foregone the ride element entirely because it served no purpose.

          More fun than Midway Mania? I am not sure about this one. The thing about Midway Mania is I seem to discover a new Easter egg every so often and that helps my score and hit percentage rise. I haven't played Alien Attack... I really should make my way to Universal, it's been a long time
          The ride system's practical purpose is keeping the capacity and efficiency high. The story is that it was designed as a testing bed for "WEB - World Engineering Brigade" tech so that the different spider web systems can be tes

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      It seems that they took the 'kids these days play roblox' philosophy to mean a ride should just be an arcade game that shuffles you screen to screen and delivers a lamer experience than you could have with a VR headset. Waste of time and space. If kids truly are so enamored of gaming that they don't go for your rides, then trying to just make the same thing they can do at home your ride isn't going to help.

    • The YouTube video of the ride is awful or the ride itself is awful? 'Cause it's kind of hard to judge a ride from a video. Especially if most of what you see is blurry as it's meant to be seen through polarized 3d glasses.

  • Neko [wikipedia.org] had rudimentary scripted behavior too. Such progress Disney.
  • I'd link the video, but it needs a Disney+ subscription...

  • West World started?

  • I don't know.. (Score:3)

    by Junta ( 36770 ) on Monday August 23, 2021 @08:00AM (#61720029)

    I feel like Five Nights at Freddy's should be a lesson...

  • So, Disney is slowly becoming the original film version of West World. Cool. Now they need to make a special adults-only park. :-D

  • Their first sentient decision will be that a soda should cost six dollars.
  • ... had the idea that when AI-s develop, they'll be rendering offscreen-footage-trained oldschool dead actor models onto the set, interacting and co-opping with living actors. Then, with extra analysis, model how them oldschool actors would develop and evolve through interactions on the set... Immortal-maestros-as-a-service, if you will.
  • Last time I was at Disney, I saw a Guardians of the Galaxy performance. The poor person in the Groot costume couldn't make it through. They had to take a break after a few minutes. Perfect application of a robot. That costume looked miserable!
    • An even better solution would be people to send their robots to Disney in place of themselves so they won't have to wait in line or buy overpriced food.
  • Alert me when one of them decides it wants to do something other than whatever task it #as built for.

    • I never wanted to be an animatronic robot anyway. What I always wanted to be... is a lumberjack!

      • never wanted to be an animatronic robot anyway. What I always wanted to be... is a lumberjack!

        that is a worthy and achievable goal. Now we just need to get the rights for Michael Palin's robo-likeness...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mark-t ( 151149 )
        That is exactly the sort of decision making that I am talking about. I believe that the best test of whether or not an AI is making its own decisions is not simply making decisions that the programmers did not expect or intentionally design, but is *ALSO* making decisions that run in some way wholly contrary to the robot's originally intended purpose. Because we usually make robots for one particular purpose, and they are not generally adaptable to other functions, I would expect that this would manifest

  • "John Hammond: All major theme parks have delays. When they opened Disneyland in 1956, nothing worked!
    Ian Malcolm: Yeah, but, John, if The Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists. "

    Coming soon...

  • While not Disneyland, Itchy and Scratchy Land already showed us what happens [youtube.com] when you give even a smidgen of intelligence to animatronic robots.

  • "Are You Ready for Sentient Disney Robots?" asks a headline at the New York Times.

    So I did the unthinkable and read the fine article. The ignorant and credulous "journalist" failed to ask any questions about Teen Groot as we can tell from the breathless title, despite being given the truth obliquely. The Teen Groot robot is not making autonomous decisions about anything. It is being remotely puppeteered. Disney previously prototyped robot puppets in the park, one tethered, one remote. Teen Groot is a continuation of that development.

    And this is where the real tech appeal of this art

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