by gkoberger
15 subcomments
- 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:
"Disney's Living Characters: A Broken Promise" by Defunctland
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyIgV84fudM
by ChrisArchitect
1 subcomments
- Related R&D paper & video:
Olaf: Bringing an Animated Character to Life in the Physical World
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16705
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L8OFMTteOo
- 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.
by sharkjacobs
1 subcomments
- > Most importantly, Olaf can speak and engage in conversations, creating a truly one-of-a-kind experience.
We already live in the world where hackers are pwning refrigerators, I can't wait for prompt injection attacks on animatronic cartoon characters.
- The lack of a video demonstration doesn't really inspire confidence.
by gsf_emergency_6
0 subcomment
- Fitting name for a humanoid.
The name Olaf comes from Old Norse Áleifr, combining "anu" (ancestor) and "leifr" (heir/relic), meaning "ancestor's heir" or "ancestor's relic,"
- 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.
by Peteragain
2 subcomments
- 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.
- “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.
- Cute but I'm more inpressed by the Disney Spiderman stunt robot https://x.com/lukas_m_ziegler/status/1910590914801655814
- 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?
- > an animated character with non-physical movements.
What is a non-physical movement?
- 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.
- Universal Studios baby dragons did it better.
- They can make a two-legged walking robot, but they can't avoid the visible seam in the back of his head?
The tech is amazing, but they need better sewing...
- When even Disney can't be bothered to write an article without using the default LLM voice... ugh.
- Five Nights at Freddys has ruined the joy animatronics for me, they just seem creepy now.
- This leads me to wonder, when are we likely to have LLMs in robot form in every day life?
by brcmthrowaway
1 subcomments
- How does a Steam Deck compare to say, TouchOSC on an iPad?
- Do they wanna build a snowman?
- For Paris, I’d honestly be more curious to see a Beast robot from *Beauty and the Beast.
Full-size might be… risky, but a small, friendly mini-Beast could be fun.
by analog8374
0 subcomment
- Strong "Simple Jack" vibes.
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by whiteboardr
1 subcomments
- [flagged]
by charcircuit
1 subcomments
- >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.
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