I met Olaf — the Frozen robot who might be the future of Disney Parks

Disney Imagineering has created a 35-inch, 33-pound Olaf robot from Frozen that uses reinforcement learning trained via 100,000 virtual copies in an Nvidia-powered simulation to achieve screen-accurate movements, launching at Disneyland Paris on March 26th. The robot is teleoperated via a Steam Deck rather than being AI-driven, but its lifelike animation — guided by the principle that 'the eyes go first, and the body follows' — convincingly crosses the uncanny valley, representing what Disney calls the future of populating theme park lands with interactive robot characters.