(11/26/12) The Disney Research Pittsburgh Lab has been coming up with some wild new developments lately. If your wondering, “Why Pittsburgh?!” right off the top of your head, this goes back to a 2008 announced partnership between
Disney and Carnegie Mellon University to create this Disney Research Lab in Pittsburgh that would focus on new developments in Robotics and Animation over a five year agreement, and we seem to be coming close to the end of this initial agreement, so it looks like they are pumping out the fruits of their labor.
This week they released a new video showing off a Disney human-form animatronic, with a modified hand, which has been
programmed to play a game a catch, through the use of an off the shelf Xbox Kinect sensor system that gives the animatronic a true set of 3D special eyes in which to see the ball. Not only can it play catch, but they can speed up the game by using three balls where it will get into a two-person juggling rhythm with you. On the chance that he missed the ball (hey, we all make mistakes), he is programmed to perform one of several different reaction animations as well, such as turning around to see where the ball went, looking down in disappointment, or shrugging his shoulders. Take a look at the video below to see this creation in action.
[video=youtube;83eGcht7IiI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83eGcht7IiI[/video]
Back in October we saw releases about two other projects to come from the Lab. One for a new
Capacitive touchscreen system that can detect different users at the same time via their unique fingerprints. The second describes new advances in 3D printing, now with the ability to
create 3D printed optic and lighting systems. The Pittsburgh lab is but one of many
Disney Research Labs, with others located Glendale, Boston, and Zurich, Switzerland, in addition to the Pixar Research Group in Emeryville, CA and the Walt Disney Animation Studios Research Lab in Burbank, CA. There is lots of fun things to see at the Disney Research website, including a couple of previous projects from the Pittsburg Lab:
TeslaTouch,
MotionBeam and
SideBySide.
