Name: Inside Disney's Secret Test Lab
Uploaded: 2025-04-09T00:12:39.000Z
Duration: 16 min 31 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This is the world's most realistic lightsaber.

Transition words & phrases

And I'm holding it because today I got the chance to go behind the scenes with Walt Disney Imagineering.

The place where Disney brings their craziest ideas to life.

From stunt robots, to a real-life version of The Force, to these adorable little droids.

On this show, we explore how technology can improve people's lives by living longer, going farther.

But the reason that I've loved Disney since I was a kid is that they use tech to improve lives a different way.

And that means that they're pushing forward what tech can do in some really crazy, unexpected ways.

So let me take you inside the magic to show you the cutting-edge tech that Disney is building, how it really works, and what happens when we put it to the test.

This is what we call our Imagineering department, where we dream up our new projects.

When Walt Disney started building Disneyland, he needed people to help him build rides and robots and castles, every aspect of this new kind of park.

He needed people who would think outside the box.

Their job was to imagine ways to bring the magic of Disney to life.

Today, the Imagineers have built these legendary parks all around the world, and they constantly come up with new ideas for them, here, in their research and development lab.

We have some friends we want you to meet.

These are the latest and greatest BDX units.

For this show, I've gotten to meet some very cool robots that can walk over uneven ground, or get pushed, or even open doors.

But what makes these droids different is their personality.

And that cuteness comes down to a bunch of very specific design and engineering decisions, from how this robot walks to how it does this little shimmy.

They're told exactly where to go by a person holding this console.

Tap and then move the stick forward or any direction.

It's important to understand that I'm telling the droid what to do.

The actual way that it responds to me comes down to its training.

Using ducklings as inspiration, Disney Imagineers created a series of animations, like in a Disney movie, for how the robot should walk, or jump, or shimmy.

Then they put a digital version of the robot into a simulation.

Most of the time when robots are trained this way, they're given a goal, and then they're rewarded based on how well they meet that goal under different circumstances.

So, for example, walk from A to B over different terrain.

So we actually have some live training going on on our computers right now.

So that's what you're seeing here is the thousands and thousands of robots trying different things, stumbling a little bit, and trying something different.

In this case, though, the droids are rewarded not just for walking from A to B, but also for how closely they follow the animations while they do that.

In these digital worlds, they can get way more reps than they would in the physical world, and they don't get damaged.

Then the Imagineers upload that training to the physical robots, and they test them with these cute little harnesses, until eventually the droids are ready to go out into the world all on their own.

These are not the robots that are most likely to be doing your laundry or working in a factory in the future.

But their design means that they're on the cutting edge of robotics in a different way.

In a world that uses more and more robotics, how we feel about something, whether or not we feel something is cute, whether we feel something is well-intentioned as opposed to scary, matters a lot for how much humans want to interact with robots.

And that also must make the development, I mean, probably more fun, but also by definition more difficult, because the reinforcement learning has two objectives.

It has don't fall, but it also has be cute about it.

That's what's really challenging about a lot of Imagineering projects, is we don't want our guests to see technologies, we want them to fall in love with a character and feel things.

It's hard not to love these little droids.

If you want to know more about how they're made to look so real, my friend Michelle Carre is making a video all about what it takes to become an Imagineer for her show Challenge Accepted.

And if you're really lucky, you might spot these droids walking around in a Disney park.

Eventually, though, I had to leave my new friends.

We have made the most realistic, expandable, extendable lightsaber ever.

He's one of the world's most famous Imagineers.

He holds over 100 patents, including for this lightsaber.

I'm going to allow you to extend and retract it.

Now, this is a prop, so we're going to be very careful with it once it's extended.

And this is the button that you push to extend it.

And it looked as real up close as it does on camera.

In the Star Wars universe, of course, these Jedi weapons work by channeling energy through a crystal to create a blade that can cut through basically anything.

In our universe, filming the Star Wars movies, actors used these fighting prop sticks, and then visual effects artists painstakingly added the glow in post-production.

But for Disney Parks, they somehow needed to make lightsabers real.

So the challenge when you're making a prop for a performer is that it has to look like what we see in the movies.

And you remember in the movies, you know, slashing, the light extends, it can cut through all sorts of things.

Well, we don't cut through all sorts of things, but we did want smooth extension of the blade.

It's that smooth extension that isn't possible with lightsaber toys that I've seen before.

Our lightsaber unrolls from internal motors that are pushing it out.

And that was important for our performers to really look like Jedi knights.

The lightsaber has a clear cap with two long translucent tapes attached to it.

That unroll from inside the lightsaber, allowing it to extend upward.

As they extend out of the hilt, the tapes bend into a concave shape to create a rigid blade.

And on those tapes are a series of bright LEDs.

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Inside Disney's Secret Test Lab

ultimately

constantly

eventually

incredible