GoKawiilis a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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You know Olaf. Before KPop Demon Hunters, before the Wicked movies, it was Disney’s Frozen that blasted show tunes like “Let It Go” and “Into the Unknown” into our lives. My little girls loved belting those tunes.
So when I met Olaf, the Disney Imagineering robot, I kept thinking: I can’t wait for my kids to meet him too.
It’s a weird thought, really, because this Olaf isn’t a “he” and can’t carry on a conversation. Why do I keep thinking “I met him” when he’s largely a remote-controlled puppet teleoperated by a Steam Deck gaming handheld?
I think the answer is that Olaf — coming to Disneyland Paris on March 26th and Hong Kong Disneyland this summer — is the rare robot that crosses the uncanny valley as long as he keeps moving. And that’s because Disney animators helped him train himself, sticking 100,000 virtual copies of the physical Olaf robot into a Nvidia-powered simulation and rewarding him for screen-accurate moves. It took just two days to train Olaf with an Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU.
“This absolutely is the future of how we’re building robot characters,” Disney Imagineering SVP of R&D Kyle Laughlin tells The Verge. He says reinforcement learning is the “true unlock” that could let Disney populate entire lands full of interactive characters, now that entire robots can be built in months instead of years.
And while Disney Imagineering has done some of this with its Star Wars droids before, those were “robots being robots,” says Laughlin. “This is our first animated character that we brought to life.”
Disney Imagineering’s Kyle Laughlin and Moritz Bächer tell The Verge about their robots. Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge
To be crystal-clear, Olaf is not artificially intelligent. The 35-inch-tall, 33-pound robot may have 25 actuators and three computers including an Nvidia Jetson Orin NX and a Raspberry Pi, but it’s not speaking for itself. It plays prerecorded lines from what sounds like Olaf’s voice actor Josh Gad while it performs animated moves.
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