Name: Inside Disney’s ‘Area 51,’ Where Lightsabers and Other Tech Are Invented | WSJ
Uploaded: 2024-06-12T04:51:43.000Z
Duration: 8 min 49 s
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Playful droids, electromagnetic eyes, and...

These inventions represent Disney's most experimental technologies, made here at its research and development lab.

It's more like Area 51, and we've done a really good job of making sure that people don't understand what's happening inside of this building.

Inventors here build creations that are crucial to drawing guests to Disney's parks.

The centerpiece of the company's most profitable unit, Disney is facing increasing competition from rivals like Universal and Lanny Smoot.

The guy behind that lightsaber is Disney's most decorated inventor.

If I see something that in the real world that is kind of quirky, maybe an illusion, I can build a whole attraction out of that.

With Disney about to embark on a major expansion of its theme park business, and with competition in the industry intensifying, So, any direction?

the company gave the journal a behind-the-scenes look at the tech that could make its next attraction.

I keep an inventory of the things that I need to do, prototypes that come about quickly.

If you don't capture it and don't bring it out of your mind into the physical world, you can sometimes lose it.

He's named on more than 70 with the company, and more than 100 throughout his career.

The idea for it is to replace a lot of the mechanisms that would be inside of a robotic head.

This, of course, is a much bigger version of it.

There are magnets at the top, bottom, left, and right of the inner eye.

And these coils create a magnetic field that move the eye left and right and up and down.

In his 25-plus years at Disney, he helped create those eyeballs, seen here in the chameleon Pascal, the floating head of Madame Leota inside the haunted mansion, Awaken the spirit!

the water harps at Epcot, and an X-ray flashlight used to teach fire safety with tech.

If you have technology, but it doesn't fit into a bigger picture, which is the story of Star Wars, or the story of one of our characters, it's of no use.

Some of those ideas take seemingly impossible things from the screen.

A computer-generated lightsaber, for instance, and make them real.

We have to make something that a guest can wield or that they can see on the stage and it has to look just like it does in the movies.

This is what Smoot calls the hero lightsaber, the most realistic one Disney has ever come up with.

It was used in performances at the company's immersive Star Wars hotel before it closed in 2023.

The key issue here was to have something that was both retractable but had the same diameter along its blade.

According to the patent, a motor in the hilt activates two long plastic semi-cylinders which come together and extend, making the blade, which is then lit by a flexible strip of LEDs.

This is just one of the lightsabers that Smoot has worked on.

Another was used in a model of what we call the penumbra, the light that is sort of ephemerally attached to the saber.

He's also helped develop technology for two more, one of which guests used in real-life lightsaber training.

I have a sort of a cottage industry in lightsabers.

Each of those inventions is actually a completely technically different thing.

The pressure is greater when a guest already is familiar with what this thing should be.

And the challenge is to deliver on that belief.

Getting the magic right is the kind of thing that can draw in new guests and turn them into repeat customers, which Disney needs.

Its rival Universal plans to open a major expansion to its Florida theme park in 2025, something Disney hasn't done there since 2019, and fans are clamoring for new experiences.

Walt Disney Imagineering is in service of making the parks attractive, and if you can make something more fun, more amazing, more surprising, more people come, and that's part of our business, to make sure we have happy people, and a lot of happy people in our parks.

One recent addition was these beady extroids for Star Wars Land.

But recreating the familiar isn't all Imagineering does.

Sometimes, Smoot's job is creating things no one has seen before, like the holo-tile.

It's the world's first and only multi-directional, modular, multi-person holo-tile floor, which is sort of an omnidirectional treadmill for multiple people.

The floor is made up of tiles of small articulating discs that spin and tilt to undo walking or push items in any direction.

In order for the floor to know where I am walking and to counteract my motion, we use LIDAR.

Beams of light, or circles of light, are emitted from these devices, and the reflected time of flight of light lets them know where my feet are on the floor.

And knowing where my feet are and the strides I'm taking, we can use software to control the floor to undo my forward motion or my sideways motion.

Smoot says holo-tile is one of his longest projects.

I'm going to go a little off-brand, off the Disney brand, to Star Trek, where they have a thing called a holodeck.

And that allows people to walk around in a place that is physically small, but they can walk forever anywhere they want.

This woodland pattern is quite popular, sir.

Disney hasn't announced plans for holo-tile yet, but in the future, it could allow guests to harness the force.

Or make them feel like they are physically moving through space while using VR.

The work that Lanny Smoot has done on the holo-tile is an incredible contribution to both how we could potentially design new attractions in virtual reality, in mixed reality, in order to leverage that investment that we've made.

Smoot's inventions at Disney have even been awarded outside of the company.

Tonight we have the privilege of celebrating Lanny, whose work has taken us to places we could only imagine.

In May, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

I must have been doing something right during my years at Disney.

Making him the second person from Disney to receive the honor.

It's a wonderful honor, but it is also a responsibility to carry on the bringing of new people, many people who look like me, into the fields of science and engineering.

When I was a kid, I didn't see Black engineers almost till the time I was one, right?

I grew up in a wealthy area, I'll say that, and being able to be a role model for folks, again, that may not have believed that you could go into a field, it's wonderful.

But Smoot's induction doesn't mark an ending.

So as I talk, and my voice is louder or lower, I am making my little friend, that's just a still image in eight places, talk.

I'm proud of the things that I've been able to do over my career, that on the technical side are good technically and used, and on the fun side at the Walt Disney Company are technical and are used.

 So, it's been a good time, and I want to keep going.