Disney imagineers have been woking on animatronic stunt men. Watch them progress from a simple stick figure to full-on robotic acrobats. Disney doesn't need artificial stunt men when we already have real stunt men and CGI in movies, but these are for the theme parks. They are called Stuntronics. Principal R&D Imagineer Tony Dohi spoke about them.
“So what this is about is the realization we came to after seeing where our characters are going on screen,” says Dohi, “whether they be Star Wars characters, or Pixar characters, or Marvel characters or our own animation characters, is that they’re doing all these things that are really, really active. And so that becomes the expectation our park guests have that our characters are doing all these things on screen — but when it comes to our attractions, what are our animatronic figures doing? We realized we have kind of a disconnect here.”
So they came up with the concept of a stunt double for the ‘hero’ animatronic figures that could take their place within a show or scene to perform more aggressive maneuvering, much in the same way a double replaces a valuable and delicate actor in a dangerous scene.
Read more about the Stuntronics robots at TechCrunch. -via reddit