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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've been somewhat close to fun animatronic robots in my jobs, and it always seems like the design and build phase has everyone excited to participate and spend money, and then the long-term maintenance phase is entirely tacked on to some lower engineers already full schedule and gets basically no budget. When you stop seeing them appearing at events and conferences, it means they're in a storage warehouse broken in a crate. The ones where they make a few duplicates last a bit longer since you have organ donors.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can make a robot that's small, soft, and not powerful enough to hurt anyone. Or you can make a robot that's strong enough to carry a laundry basket or climb stairs holding a vacuum cleaner. But you can only operate that big strong robot when there are no humans around. Is that big strong robot an investable idea?
“Prototype-completed design varies.” …Reading this 10 times made me uncomfortably aware of how much I rely on scanning pictures and reading captions to get the gist of an article. A remnant of my academic days perhaps.
The real reason it won't end up in a park is not the engineering. The problem is the same one as NPCs in computer games: synthetic characters are, to date, just really transparent and boring. The real research question is why.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 53.8 ms ] threadOlaf: Bringing an Animated Character to Life in the Physical World
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16705
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L8OFMTteOo
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
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
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.
We already live in the world where hackers are pwning refrigerators, I can't wait for prompt injection attacks on animatronic cartoon characters.
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.
The tech is amazing, but they need better sewing...
The much greater challenge faced by Disney and Co is making "killer cyborgs" child save and cost effective.
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.
The name Olaf comes from Old Norse Áleifr, combining "anu" (ancestor) and "leifr" (heir/relic), meaning "ancestor's heir" or "ancestor's relic,"
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.