I Tried a Disney Secret Project!

(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)