8:01
I'm at Walt Disney World getting a backstage pass to see how some of its attractions are getting a bit of a high-tech facelift. Animatronics are designed in new ways. Unreal Engine and Nvidia chips are powering real-time graphics processing, giving you more options than ever before. And scoring systems are a little more complicated than you may realize. This is way more than just fast rides. I went behind the scenes to talk to engineers, producers, and uh a few other characters behind the upgrades. What is your secret to staying fresh throughout the years? Ooh, organic vegan green smoothies.
Ooh, nothing fresher than that. The first stop is at the Rock and Roller Coaster at Disney's Hollywood Studios. Here, the Muppets are the new star of the ride. And in the story, you have to help the Muppet band, the Electric Mayhem, get to their concert in time. But look close at this animatronic figure of Scooter. And you're going to notice he's not like other Disney robots. With this rethe, the designers wanted to make sure that this animatronic really looked like a puppet. There's no machinery in his skinny arms. Instead, the robot is the puppeteer.
One of the design principles that we wanted to focus on was we wanted to make sure that we were creating a scooter as though he was being uh puppeted by a human. So you'll notice that his arm is being moved by a rod there. We actually have two robotic arms uh that are one is acting as a hand uh for his head and the other one is articulating uh the rod for his hand. And that is exactly as a puppeteer would puppet scooter in real life. And so by doing this, we were then able to use motion capture technology. And we actually worked with the real puppeteer who
works with Scooter to record him using motion capture. And then we translated all that detail uh into what you see in the attraction today. This is the first time motion capture was used to create a Disney animatronic. And it's also the first time that Disney used 3D printing technology to create the shell of the animatronic body. So that's going to be handy if they ever need spare parts for some scooter repairs. Before that's a process that would have taken months at a time, but now using these new technologies available to us, we can fast iterate uh and create those
rather quickly. The pre-show staging area used to have a video here that was a projection screen, but now Disney replaced it with a digital LED screen. We know the technology has advanced so far in 20 years that we get so much more uh depth and color at using the LED screen like the black color space there. It really gives the feeling that room goes on and that the Muppets are actually there in the room with you. Look at how tech culture also influences the design. In the pre-show, they added screens and they became this like social media Tik Tok Esque
uh live stream of what was going on that you could follow. So, you're doom scrolling basically as you're in line wondering what happened to the band. There is 45 minutes of live stream content, but you're only in this room for about a minute and a half. And that means everyone's experience is different. And when you finally load into that high-speed limo, it's going to shoot you off at 60 miles an hour and then you're rocking out to one of five different songs. I also really appreciate all these jokes and references to the Disney of the past.
And I think that's always the twist. How do you make it seem like it'll continue on timeless, but give a little nod to the past? Getting to that concert, we were in a pretty fast vehicle. What's it like compared to your van? Oh, beats me, you know. Thankfully, the Limo designed by Muppet Labs is self-driving, so it got us to the gig in no time flat. Oh, yeah. It was like so wild going fast that I barely had time to center myself before we were there. Was it was like what? That fast. Oh no. Give yourself a little whiplash. Racing over to the Star Wars side of the park, we get to Galaxy's Edge and the ride Millennium
Falcon Smugglers Run, where the Mandalorian and Grogu now took over the entire storyline. But more powerful graphics computing here means you can do a whole lot more now in this ride. You want to think of this attraction like a video game. Everything you do in the ride, how you fly the ship, fire the blasters, or grab the cargo, it's all rendered in real time using a blend of five projectors. We have all new show game computers running um our new video game running Unreal Engine 5 as well as all new Nvidia GPUs, kind of blending the software and the
hardware together to bring this new mission to life. At Extra Computing is boosting the resolution to 4K at 60 frames a second, and now the system can handle multiple planets. The engineer can choose to light speed jump to Endor, Bestpin, or Coruscant, which all have their own challenges. The engineer position, it's one of my favorite ads, is the call Grogo button, all real time. So, so you got six people, all with different controls, all affecting the outcome of this video game. And still, the engineers found ways to sneak in hidden Easter eggs. For example,
if you hang a hard left and corissant, you can unlock cantina background music. If you play Fortnite and you link your Fortnite account to your Disney account, the little shipment crates that you collect in the ride can give you a bonus inside your Fortnite game. We're really find starting to find ways where we can tie your physical inpark experience to your digital experience back home and join those two worlds together. I think we damaged the ship a little bit. I made it. I'm not such a good pilot. I really like what they did to this ride. It's
really cool. I was worried. I wondered what the Mandalorian element would do. It's better. Okay, so you have these extra variables where the engineer gets to pick where you're jumping to, which different planet you're going to. And aside from having to control this thing, the Mandalorian is helping you out. He's telling you what to do. He's explaining it as you go. So even if you're kind of overwhelmed because a lot's going on, it doesn't feel that overwhelming. And there are moments where you could just kick back and enjoy what's happening. So, I think it's good for gamers and non-gamers. Overall, total level up. But now, let's jump to a different kind of space video game.
At Buzz Lighter, Space Ranger spin in Magic Kingdom. They changed the whole system on how the blasters work. And there's a whole lot of computing inside each of these ride vehicles. In this ride, you pick up a blaster in a moving vehicle and you're aiming for targets as you rack up points and help Buzz Lightyear and Star Command defeat Zerg. This ride came out almost 30 years ago. It has always been a shooting competition, but now you have blasters that detach. It's easier to see the laser. The targets have become these animated screens, and you can also feel, see, and hear when your targets hit. And all of this is in sync because each of these vehicles have two independent Unreal
Engine machines running. There's one for each player. Unreal Engine is a system that's used to make video games. It's also used in that Falcon ride, but here they got 200 of them just in this ride alone. It's doing real-time scoring. It's tracking where your ride vehicle is at any given time and what you've successfully hit. Um, and so it's constantly feeding you live updates in your score. Um, our score screens are all new as well. So, they're tracking your rank progress. Um, throughout the adventure as well, there's around the perimeter of your score screen, there's little
tabs. These each represent a unique target in the attraction. And then you'll get a little bit of a bonus at the very end where all of the targets that you've hit in the attraction will feed in for extra points as well. So, it's a lot of fun, cool to game stuff that we haven't been tracking before. So, we needed the tools to be able to do so. The computer systems are also feeding data to your souvenir photo you take at the end. This is also a first for having your ride score affect your photo. And as the photo pass team tells us, it might be the start of more interesting
photo effects to come. Do you ever experiment with technology when you're creating music? Oh, for sure. We experiment with um hi-fi cassettes, synthesizers, waw wa FM radio. Yeah. We love all kinds of tech whether people still use it or not. So experimenting with new tech is a must for theme parks who are serving a modern guest. These guests are techsavvy with video games. They understand what good screen should be. And yet you just have to weave in tech in the right way to keep it feeling classic for the next generation. Hey, what are you guys doing up there?
Suffering. Yeah. Well, the show's over. Everyone's leaving. Yeah, that's our favorite part. Go. Okay.
