I Tried a Disney Secret Project!
Summary
TLDRIn a fascinating exploration, Marques Brownlee visits the Disney Imagineering Labs to experience cutting-edge technology. He's greeted by animatronic droids similar to Boston Dynamics' Spot robot, capable of navigating any terrain. The highlight is the HoloTile, a 360-degree treadmill that allows for omnidirectional movement, controlled through walking, a PlayStation controller, or hand gestures. Brownlee tests the HoloTile and discusses its potential applications in virtual reality, noting the challenge of aligning visual and physical sensations to prevent motion sickness. The video concludes with excitement for the future of this technology and its possible integration into theme park experiences or home entertainment.
Takeaways
- 🎢 Marques Brownlee visited the Disney Imagineering Labs, where attractions, theme parks, and rides are designed and engineered with a significant amount of technology.
- 🤖 He encountered animatronic robots at the entrance that resemble the Boston Dynamics Spot robot, capable of navigating various terrains and following instructions.
- 🚀 The HoloTile, a unique 360-degree treadmill, is an experimental technology that allows for movement in any direction, with potential applications in virtual reality (VR).
- 🔄 The HoloTile operates using a floor of articulating cones with spinning discs on top, which move in response to the user's direction, creating a moving floor experience.
- 📊 The system can be controlled in three ways: walking, using a PlayStation controller, or through hand gestures that the sensors interpret to move the floor.
- 🧐 Marques experienced a learning curve while using the HoloTile, noting that it's loud and that users don't walk in perfectly straight lines due to the movement of the discs.
- 👥 Lanny Smoot, the inventor of the HoloTile, demonstrated how two people could use it simultaneously for multiplayer games, suggesting its potential for interactive experiences.
- 🕹️ Using the HoloTile with a VR headset creates an immersive experience, but it can be disorienting due to the brain's confusion between visual input and physical sensation.
- 🚀 The potential future of the HoloTile includes smaller, more numerous discs for smoother movement, addressing current engineering and Imagineering challenges.
- 🤔 Marques expressed concerns about motion sickness that could arise from the discrepancy between visual and physical movement, a common issue with VR technology.
- 🌟 The HoloTile represents a significant step towards more immersive and realistic VR experiences, and Marques is excited to see how the technology develops in the future.
Q & A
What is the Disney Imagineering Labs?
-The Disney Imagineering Labs are secret labs within the Walt Disney Company where they design and engineer attractions, theme parks, and rides. They incorporate a significant amount of technology, some of which is experimental and unreleased.
What similarities do the Disney theme park droids share with the Boston Dynamics Spot robot?
-The Disney theme park droids share similarities with the Boston Dynamics Spot robot in their ability to navigate any terrain with an adaptive gait and follow instructions from a custom controller, making them versatile for various tasks and interactive with guests.
What is the HoloTile and what is its purpose?
-The HoloTile is an experimental 360-degree treadmill-like moving floor designed for immersive experiences, particularly in virtual reality. It allows users to walk in any direction and features a unique design with spinning discs to facilitate movement.
How does the HoloTile work mechanically?
-The HoloTile consists of many tiny, one-inch discs that spin on top of articulating cones with motors inside. The discs are tilted so that only their edges touch the floor, allowing them to spin and move the user's feet back to the center, regardless of the direction walked.
What are the three ways to control the HoloTile?
-The three ways to control the HoloTile are by walking on it, using a controller such as a PlayStation 5 controller, and using gestures by pointing at the HoloTile with your hands.
How does the HoloTile's hand gesture control work?
-The hand gesture control works by mapping movements of the user's hand in front of a certain line to move the floor accordingly. The program tracks the hand's movement and adjusts the floor's position in real-time to match.
What challenges did Marques Brownlee face when using the HoloTile?
-Marques Brownlee faced challenges such as getting used to the feeling of the moving tiles, the loud noise it produces, and the cognitive dissonance between what his eyes saw in the VR headset and what his body and brain felt while walking on the HoloTile.
What is the inventor of the HoloTile, Lanny Smoot's background?
-Lanny Smoot has been with Disney for over 20 years and holds more than 70 patents, including inventions like the way BB8 rolls around the park and real-life lightsabers, making him a legend at Disney.
How does the HoloTile enhance the virtual reality experience?
-The HoloTile enhances the VR experience by providing a physical walking surface that moves with the user, reducing the disconnect between visual input and physical sensation, which can lead to motion sickness in traditional VR setups.
What are some potential future applications of the HoloTile?
-Potential future applications of the HoloTile include use in theme parks for immersive experiences, home entertainment systems for exploring virtual worlds, and possibly as a training or simulation tool in various industries.
What are some of the current limitations of the HoloTile?
-Current limitations of the HoloTile include its size, which restricts the movement area, the noise it produces, and the initial learning curve and cognitive adjustment required for users to feel comfortable using it, especially in conjunction with a VR headset.
Outlines
🤖 Exploring Disney Imagineering Labs
Marques Brownlee visits the secretive Disney Imagineering Labs to explore the technology behind Disney's theme parks and attractions. He is greeted by animatronic robots similar to Boston Dynamics' Spot robot, which can navigate various terrains and follow instructions. The technology is impressive, blending animations for realistic movement. Marques also gets to try the HoloTile, a unique 360-degree treadmill designed for potential future applications, especially in virtual reality.
🚀 First Experience with the HoloTile
Marques describes his first encounter with the HoloTile, an experimental device that allows for omnidirectional movement. The HoloTile consists of small spinning discs that tilt and rotate under the user's feet to match their walking direction. He experiences controlling the HoloTile in three different ways: walking, using a PlayStation 5 controller, and gesturing with his hands. Marques also discusses the learning curve and the device's potential applications in theme parks and VR experiences.
🕹️ VR Integration and Future Prospects
Marques tries out the HoloTile with a VR headset, noting the challenge of reconciling the visual input from the headset with the physical sensation of walking in place. He observes that the HoloTile could potentially solve the issue of motion sickness in VR caused by the disconnect between visual and physical movement. Marques is amazed by the inventor Lanny Smoot's proficiency with the HoloTile and envisions a future where such technology might enable immersive virtual exploration from the comfort of one's home.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Disney Imagineering Labs
💡Animatronic Robots
💡HoloTile
💡Boston Dynamics Spot Robot
💡Steam Deck Controller
💡Articulating Cones
💡Virtual Reality (VR)
💡Lanny Smoot
💡Apple Vision Pro
💡Motion Sickness
💡Multiplayer Racing Game
Highlights
Marques visited the secret Disney Imagineering Labs to see the technology behind Disney's attractions.
Disney Imagineering designs and engineers attractions, theme parks, and rides with a significant amount of technology.
Some technology at the labs is experimental and unreleased, with Marques being one of the few outsiders to experience it.
Disney creates realistic animatronic robots for their attractions, similar to the Boston Dynamics Spot robot.
The animatronic droids can adapt to any terrain and follow instructions from an easy-to-learn controller.
Marques was the first person outside of Disney to walk on the HoloTile, a 360-degree treadmill.
The HoloTile is in an experimental phase and has potential applications in virtual reality (VR).
The HoloTile consists of many tiny, one-inch discs that spin and turn to match the direction of the user's walk.
The technology allows for free movement in any direction, a significant advancement over traditional treadmills.
There are three ways to control the HoloTile: walking, using a controller like a PlayStation 5, and gesture control.
Marques experienced the HoloTile with a PlayStation controller and found it surprisingly easy to adapt to.
Training mode on the HoloTile gradually increases the speed and responsiveness to the user's movements.
The HoloTile is loud, which could be a challenge for future applications such as theme park integration.
Marques noted the unique sensation of not walking in a perfectly straight line due to the movement of the individual discs.
Lanny Smoot, the inventor of the HoloTile, demonstrated advanced control and the potential for multiplayer games on the device.
Using the HoloTile with a VR headset provided an immersive experience, despite the initial difficulty of reconciling visual and physical movement.
The HoloTile has the potential to revolutionize VR experiences by eliminating the disconnect between visual and physical motion.
Marques expressed excitement and curiosity about the future development of the HoloTile and its applications.
Transcripts
(bright music)
- [Marques] Okay, I got to see something really,
really cool.
I got to visit some of the secret labs
inside of the Walt Disney Company
called the Disney Imagineering Labs.
So, you know, I've seen some people talk
about them a little bit before,
but obviously Disney has all these attractions,
and theme parks, and rides,
and somebody has to design and engineer all that stuff.
And there is a surprising amount of tech that goes into it.
And some of it is still experimental and unreleased,
where no one outside of Disney,
well, except for me now, has got to use them.
This thing is so cool.
So Disney Imagineering has a bunch of these buildings
scattered around this California neighborhood
that I got to visit,
where they make realistic animatronic robots
as part of their attractions.
They literally greeted me at the door
with these little droids,
the same ones that are roaming around the theme parks.
And these things have a striking amount of similarities
to the Boston Dynamics Spot robot
that I got to play with a few years ago.
You know, that Spot robot was able to navigate any terrain
with an adaptive gait,
and it followed instructions from a custom,
but surprisingly easy to learn controller
so that it could navigate around
and do jobs that humans won't.
And it's also super fun to play with.
These little droids for the theme parks
are a lot of the same stuff.
They are able to adapt to any terrain,
they walk around, they follow instructions
from a customized steam deck as a controller,
which took me like 60 seconds to learn,
and they can navigate around relentlessly all day,
interacting with guests at a theme park
and being fun to play with.
It was super fun.
And it's also seriously crazy how much tech
is even inside one of these things.
It's literally, it's blending all these animations together
from the walking, to the standing and looking around.
It's pretty cool.
But that's not even what I was there to try.
I was there specifically to be
the first person outside of Disney
to walk on the HoloTile.
So you might've seen some videos about this.
The HoloTile.
It's this insane, one of one, 360 degree treadmill,
like a moving floor basically.
It's still in an experimental phase
and this is the only one that exists,
but it's already got these gears turning in my head
about future potential applications, particularly in VR.
And actually one specific thing
that I have reservations about,
but I'll get to that in a minute.
Now, I don't know that anyone's actually fully explained
exactly how this thing works yet,
but you can see that they're basically walking across
a huge number of these tiny, one inch discs
that are spinning on top of their bases
like a bunch of tiny treadmills
and then turning to match the direction that you're walking.
So obviously a normal treadmill is one direction, right?
Just one flat plane moving forward and spinning around.
So you always know exactly where you're going.
But let's say you want to build a treadmill
that's responsive and can go in any direction.
Well a flat treadmill,
it would be really hard, right?
It would have to spin around quickly
to match direction you're walking,
which is just kind of insane.
So instead built into the floor
is a bunch of articulating cones
with discs on top of them,
with motors inside to spin those discs.
Okay, and then the key here is the discs are tilted.
So only the edge of the disc in the air
is the part that's actually touching what's on the floor.
So it's less of a flat treadmill
and more of a bunch of small blades
that are rotating under your feet.
So when you walk forward,
they spin clockwise to move your foot back to the middle
once it's landed.
And actually when you walk backwards,
they been counterclockwise
to move your foot back to the middle.
So no matter where you go, whatever direction you walk,
no matter how long or how fast your stride is,
it'll always pull you right back to the middle.
So I've seen these videos that Disney's put out
of this guy walking on it,
but we gotta work our way up to that.
You know, I've never walked on it before
and it's capable of some other things.
So let's graduate, let's get there.
So there are three ways to control this thing.
There is walking on it, obviously,
but there's also using a controller,
like a PlayStation 5 controller.
And there's also just straight up using the force
and just pointing at it with your hands.
Let's start there.
So first we put this apple box on the HoloTile.
And there's a screen up here
that shows in real time all of the inputs
and what the sensors are seeing,
both on the floor and around the floor.
And they've actually mapped anything
that crosses a certain line in front of me
to move whatever object is on the floor.
So when I move my hand in front of that line,
the program moves the floor around to match the movement
of the object with the movement of my hand.
And this is pretty sick.
I assume everyone watching this has seen Star Wars
and realizes how dope it would be
to have something like this in some sort
of Star Wars experience in a theme park.
So this is already super cool,
but then the first time I actually get
to get on the HoloTile myself is in a chair
and with a PlayStation controller.
So I'm gonna be in a chair
where the chair is on a piece of wood
so it's just flat bottom,
and then they just handed me the PlayStation controller.
And, well, see for yourself.
- Yup.
- [Speaker] 3, 2, 1, enable.
(tiles rustling)
(tiles rustling)
- [Marques] So the left joystick is mapped
to control position,
and the right joystick controls rotation.
So you can spin around, and move around freely,
and actually get pretty quickly used to this thing.
And if you're wondering, yes,
I can steer myself completely off of the floor,
it would let me, I was just kind of trying to be careful
to not fling myself off the edge.
But it moves so fast.
(tiles rustling)
So now after all that,
now that I've experienced how it moves,
now they're gonna let me walk on the HoloTile.
- All right, so I'm gonna start with training mode,
which is a fraction of the normal speed,
but will still get me used to how this works.
So, I'm ready.
- [Speaker] 3, 2, 1, enable.
- [Marques] Training mode is on.
So now, slowly start to walk.
I can feel them kind of wiggling a little bit,
but not really moving too quickly yet.
So this is normal.
Oh, okay, now they're starting to move
and my feet are starting to move with the tiles.
There we go.
So as I slowly walk a little bit faster,
a little bit more quickly, a little longer strides,
I'm getting more used to the feeling of the tiles.
So they designed this to be about a two minute process
as these tiny tiles slowly speed up
their responsiveness to my movements.
And it was slowly turned up more and more,
basically until it was at a hundred percent real time.
It's moving pretty close to full speed now feels like.
And there's obviously a learning curve,
but I feel like I'm good enough at it
that I can kind of walk around and not think too hard.
Feels good.
And then there's all the data behind me in real time.
Showing my feet, my legs.
So walking on this, I noticed a couple things.
First of all, as you've heard through this video,
it's pretty loud.
Like this is gonna be something
they definitely are gonna wanna work on,
especially if it's something that'll be
a part of a theme park someday,
or maybe even in someone's home.
But also, I found it fascinating,
you're never actually quite walking
in a perfectly straight line.
Like, it can feel pretty close
if your foot happens to line up along a row of discs
that are all aligned in a way from the center.
But other times you're just kind of gliding
over the top of a bunch of these ridges
and you're not moving in a perfectly straight line.
I imagine a future version of this
looks like a whole bunch of much smaller
and more numerous discs
that are just as powerful as they are,
which is clearly an engineering challenge,
or an Imagineering challenge.
So yeah, this takes some getting used to.
I know that because I got to hang out
with the inventor of the HoloTile, Lanny Smoot.
He's been at Disney for more than 20 years.
He's got more than 70 patents,
including the way the BB8 rolls around the park,
the real life lightsabers, just to name a few.
He's kind of a legend.
And, yeah, this guy's incredible on it.
He was showing me that you can have two people
on it at once,
and they were playing a multiplayer racing game,
like controlling a BB8 eight around a course
by jogging around.
And it seemed to work pretty well,
aside from being pretty small.
Obviously this would work better
if they had more of these floor tiles.
But then what I found the most crazy
is using this floor with a VR headset on.
So this is what you would expect it to be for,
for VR, right?
And there's been some other
360-degree treadmill type of videos I've seen,
other types of inventions used for VR.
And they work,
but the one thing that's hard about these,
and it's hard to explain through video,
but the difference between what your eyes see
and what your body and brain feel, that disagreement.
So meaning like, this has always been true,
if you look down at your phone a lot in a moving car, right?
Your eyes are seeing something still,
they see your body sitting still,
but then your brain and your inner ear
feels you moving around, moving forward.
And so the disagreement between what your eyes see
and what your brain feel,
that's what can give you motion sickness.
That's what feels bad.
And so if you think about it, it's the same thing
with this moving treadmill in VR.
You put the headset on and you start walking,
and your eyes see
that you are walking down a moving hallway,
you're moving forward.
But your brain, because you're walking in place,
doesn't feel that it's supposed to be moving forward.
So again, there's a disagreement there.
So with the HoloTile,
I got to try putting on an Apple Vision Pro
and actually walking around a 3D constructed environment.
You can't see it, but I'm in like a holo deck
in Star Trek or something,
and I've got a harness on because it turns out
this is really hard.
My eyes see the movement,
and my legs are trying to walk forward,
and my feet are sliding around,
but my brain thinks I'm not supposed to be moving forward.
So, it's confusing.
It's hard to just trust it and walk.
Plus there's the extra layer
of sometimes it moves you backwards a little bit
to the center.
So I was taking all these baby steps.
Meanwhile though, watch Lanny do it,
and he's just incredible at it.
Like he had the headset on,
he was walking around confidently through space,
exploring a virtual world.
Pretty sure it's like
a virtual Disney theme park type of thing.
But that's the type of thing
that feels the most like the future.
Just freeform,
exploring some huge space, walking around,
in the comfort of your own home maybe.
And that would be amazing.
And if this thing can continue to be developed,
maybe, just maybe,
it can get us closer to that reality someday.
Either way, that is definitely dope tech.
I'm glad I got to see the first version of this,
and I'm very curious and excited to see future versions.
Disney, please invite me back.
I wanna see what the future of this actually looks like.
Okay, that's it.
Thanks for watching.
Catch you in the next one.
Peace.
(bright music)
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