Full Name
Walt Disney Imagineering
About
Walt Disney Imagineering, abbreviated WDI and known in Chinese as 华特迪士尼幻想工程, is the creative and engineering division of The Walt Disney Company that designs Disney theme parks, resorts, cruise ships and attractions worldwide. It was founded by Walt Disney in 1952, originally as WED Enterprises, and is headquartered in Glendale, California; the Imagineers were the people who established the themed entertainment industry, and the division describes itself as a world-class design firm, a premier development company, an extraordinary storytelling studio and a cutting-edge innovation lab rolled into one. Its robotics work sits inside that mandate rather than beside it, because the characters it builds have to perform convincingly on a stage every day. Two projects are recorded here. Stuntronics, revealed in 2018, is an aerial stunt robot that performs acrobatic figures in mid-air for park shows. The Na'vi Shaman is a large animatronic figure that welcomes guests on the Na'vi River Journey attraction inside Pandora, The World of Avatar at Disney's Animal Kingdom in Florida, which opened in 2017; Disney's own Imagineers and the technology press have described it as the most advanced animatronic the company had ever built at the time. Across the wider division, Disney's dexterous-character work also includes the rapid design tools Imagineering developed for mechatronic characters and the research published by Imagineer Morgan Pope on using electromagnetism to generate expressive motion. The division's public site is at sites.disney.com/waltdisneyimagineering, while the corporate parent site is the URL recorded for this company.
Technical Overview
Contact Information
Robot Products
Na'vi Shaman
Released 2017
Development Timeline
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