Disney has plenty of impressive theme park audio-animatronic figures, but its latest robot might be its most unusual: It's the first one made using motion-capture technology on a Muppet.
The Muppets are the new stars of the Rock 'n' Roller Coaster at Disney's Hollywood Studios in Florida. Walt Disney Imagineering wanted to build an animatronic version of Scooter, the geeky right-hand man to Kermit the Frog and backstage manager for the puppet gang of performers.
Watch this: Imagineers Share Secrets of Disney's New Ride Technology
But instead of building a robot shaped like Scooter, the team built one that acts like a puppeteer. Imagineers recorded the movements of the real-life Muppet performer and created a robotic system that mimics the hand gestures used to control Scooter's mouth and arm stick. Scooter is also said to be the first Disney audio-animatronic to use 3D printing technology for its shell.
Disney invited me to check out some of the latest high-tech upgrades debuting this week to guests at Walt Disney World parks, which you can see more about in the video embedded above. Several Imagineers I spoke with shared details of the machines needed to power these upgrades.
But it's clear that our tech culture is also shaping storytelling. For example, in the queue for the Muppets coaster, guests watch "livestream" video clips that mimic social media feeds on vertical displays, flipping upward in the doomscrolling style as they get updates on the storyline and the missing Muppet band, The Electric Mayhem.
Meanwhile, other attractions level up their gameplay and scoring systems with the same tech used to produce today's high-end video games.
Nvidia's latest processors and machines running Unreal Engine 5 are powering new experiences at the Star Wars attraction Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run. Here, the ride itself is designed like a giant video game, with guests seated at the controls of the Falcon, determining the outcome of a mission as they pilot the ship, blast enemies through space and keep an eye on a cute Grogu. The visuals are now rendered in 4K at 60 frames per second, up from 3K at 50 frames per second, displayed in real time through a blend of five projectors.
The ride's storyline has been taken over by the Mandalorian and Grogu -- a change introduced the same weekend their movie premiered -- and with the upgraded graphics processing, guests can now choose from three planets to jump to at the end of their mission, adding more variables than when the ride debuted seven years ago.
In another galaxy, not so far, far away in the Magic Kingdom theme park, a space man from the Toy Story universe is also benefiting from Unreal Engine technology. But instead of Disney using the machines for real-time graphics rendering, the company is using them to keep score in the updated shooting game of Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin.
Each rider picks up a laser blaster in a moving vehicle, shooting at targets that now feature more dynamic animations. The blaster also makes aiming and scoring easier with improved haptic feedback.
But to keep a real-time score with this new dynamic system, each rider's blaster is tied to its own Unreal Engine machine. With 100 moving vehicles, that means there are 200 individual Unreal systems running in the attraction.
I've been visiting these parks with my family for decades. I've been on these rides both as a kid and as a parent to my own kids, and these updates were all noticeable improvements, especially the repeatable gameplay of the Millennium Falcon and Buzz Lightyear rides. What I also appreciate is that the new technology was added in a way that never feels distracting, helping the attractions retain the timeless quality that could keep them classics for another generation over the next 30 years.