The new Olaf will debut in early 2026 at two of Disney's parks abroad.
Just as Imagineers' BDX Droids have been added to the upcoming film "The Mandalorian & Grogu," visuals the film are being added to Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run at Disneyland and Walt Disney World, further bridging park and film experiences for Disney fans.
H.E.R.B.I.E. met guests in Disneyland's Tomorrowland for a limited time.
Imagineers play test an Olaf prototype.
Disney Imagineers demonstrate new projection mapping technology on an episode of "We Call It Imagineering" dedicated to Research & Development.
Walt Disney is seen in his namesake Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland. The attraction featuring cutting-edge audio-animatronic figures opened on June 23, 1963.

GLENDALE, CA – Do you want to build a snowman?

Disney has, and it’s unlike anything you’ve seen in person before.

Disney Imagineers have created a new Olaf robot that looks and sounds like he’s shuffled off the screen in stocky little snow feet with spindly twig arms, wonder-filled eyes and a detachable carrot nose.

“So real and amazing and funny and sweet and charming,” Walt Disney Imagineering President and CEO Bruce Vaughn told USA TODAY. “Everything that you dreamt would be like if you could actually meet him, but never thought you could.”

“Frozen” fans can get their first look at the waist-high robot on a new episode of Walt Disney Imagineering’s YouTube docuseries, “We Call It Imagineering.”

I had a chance to see him myself at Imagineering’s traditionally secretive Research and Development lab in Glendale, but Olaf wasn’t the only thing that wowed me. What I saw will change the way we all experience parks.

Bridging film and reality

You cannot convince me that the BDX Droids I interacted with were not alive.

The adorable, pint-sized, “Star Wars”-inspired droids have already made a few appearances at Disney properties and will make their big-screen debut next year in "The Mandalorian and Grogu.”

Seeing them waddle around like ducklings, curiously turning their heads when I spoke, they felt full of personality and life. In actuality, they’ve been programmed with thousands of hours of artificial intelligence-powered reinforcement learning, in partnership with Nvidia.

“The joy is so incredible that we forgot about the technology, and that’s exactly the point,” Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang says in the Research & Development episode of “We Call It Imagineering.”

Another such robot is the Fantastic Four’s H.E.R.B.I.E., who debuted at Disneyland the same day “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” opened in theaters this past summer. When I saw him at Imagineering, I marveled at how he managed to roll around and keep balance on a single ball, as fluidly as on film.

While these appearances have been limited in nature so far, guests can expect to see more down the line, as the bridge between on-screen and real-world experiences narrows.

"In all my years, I've never felt so tightly connected to those creating the media,” Vaughn said.

Bringing Olaf to life

Olaf will make his park debut early next year at the upcoming World of Frozen at Disneyland Paris and the existing World of Frozen at Hong Kong Disneyland.

“He can actually just walk around, and because of the new reinforcement learning and use of AI for design, we can use the same animators who brought the animated character to life to bring this one to life, so there isn't a loss of translation there,” Vaughn said.

“To have Olaf walk out like that, I think it just pushes people to [believe]. ... We met Olaf. It was actually the real Olaf,” he added.

Unlike the larger-than-life meet-and-greet character in parks like Disney’s Hollywood Studios, the robot is much smaller, the same scale as in the films. He also speaks, voiced by Josh Gad, like in the films.

Vaughn said they were still playing around with whether to give Olaf physical eyes or projection ones. Imagineers have made tremendous progress in projection-mapping technology since the current figures of EPCOT’s Frozen Ever After debuted.

“You have to also meet your guests where they are, and the guests are getting more and more sophisticated, and expectations get higher,” he said.

It all started with a ... bird

Walt Disney famously credited Mickey Mouse for his impact on the world, but when it comes to robotics, he and early Imagineers broke ground with the birds they created for Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room, which debuted at Disneyland in 1963 as the world’s first show to feature audio-animatronics.

A year later, Disney's audio-animatronic Abraham Lincoln debuted at the 1964 World’s Fair and looked so real that some spectators thought it was a live actor.

In recent years, I’ve heard a similar debate among casual park goers at Disney California Adventure, where a Spider-Man stuntronic designed by Imagineers flips and flies through the air at Avengers Campus.

“A human could not perform those flips,” Vaughn said. “They could be done in [computer graphics], they could do it in hand drawing, but you certainly couldn’t do it multiple times a day. So how do we deliver on that moment that you never thought you would see with your own eyes of Spider-Man literally flipping through the air like that? ... That's what we want to do.”

Just like audio-animatronics, now commonplace across theme parks and entertainment venues, these new emerging robotics will shape the park experiences of tomorrow.

Olaf is just the next step.

The reporter on this story was provided access by Disney. USA TODAY maintains editorial control of content.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Disney's latest innovation will change park experiences

Reporting by Eve Chen, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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