Disney teases an Olaf robot for its parks

Disney has unveiled a new animatronic in the form of Olaf, the carrot-nosed snowman from the Frozen series of films. The robotic character will roam the streets of the upcoming World of Frozen (coming soon to Adventure World at Disneyland Paris) and make "limited-time special appearances at World of Frozen at the Hong Kong Disneyland resort," Disney wrote on its parks blog.

Olaf, seen in prototype form in a 30-minute Disney video, can walk on his little snowball legs, emote realistically and speak with visitors. During the video, Disney Imagineering Paris exec Michel Den Dulk removes and replaces the robot's nose and arm, something park visitors will also be able to do.

To help make Olaf look authentic and toon-like in his movements, the Imagineering team used AI reinforcement learning. That allowed them to teach the robot how to walk and perform "graceful" motions in far less time than it would have taken to program it manually, Disney said. The fact that Olaf has a soft, snow-like exterior also let them "fully articulate his mouth, eyes, and removable carrot nose and arms."

The timing of the announcement is pretty wild considering that Defunctland, the amusement park history site, just released a four-hour YouTube documentary about the broken promise of Disney's animatronics. The main point was that Disney has announced many such characters but only shows them off at a few special events before shoving them away, Westworld basement-style, never to be seen again.

A few examples of those are the Wall-E robot in the aughts and, more recently, Groot and Star Wars droids. Those served mainly as marketing pieces for Disney, as they only appeared in the parks for specific tests and then disappeared. Disney even made a robot called Big Dino that was 13 feet tall and weighed 11,000 pounds — though it's probably best that one wasn't roaming around the parks greeting visitors.