Walt Disney task force creation is owing to study artificial intelligence and how it can be applied across the entertainment conglomerate. Disney task force launched earlier this year, before the Hollywood writers’ strike, Disney task force is looking to develop AI applications in-house as well as form partnerships with startups, as per sources.
As evidence of its interest, there are 11 current job opening at Disney machine learning or artificial intelligence expert candidates can apply.
A Disney spokesperson declined to comment with regards to task force on artificial intelligence.
Disney task force on artificial intelligence
As per source companies like Disney must either figure out AI or risk obsolescence.
This supporter of Disney task force on artificial intelligence, sees it as one tool to help control the soaring costs of movie and television production, which can swell to $300 million for a major film release.
For its parks business, AI could enhance customer support or create novel interactions, said the second source as well as a former Disney Imagineer, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
Machine learning, the branch of AI that gives computers the ability to learn without being programmed, informs its vision systems, so it is able to recognize and navigate objects in its environment and that is why for Disney machine learning is important.
Disney has been careful about how it discusses AI in public.
Cost of AI development
Disney has invested in technological innovation since its earliest days. In 1928 it debuted “Steamboat Willie”, the first cartoon to feature a synchronized soundtrack. It now holds more than 4,000 patents with applications in theme parks, films and merchandise, according to a search of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office records.
Disney machine learning
Bob Iger, made the embrace of technology one of his three priorities when he was first named CEO in 2005.
Three years later, the company announced a major research and development initiative with top technology universities around the world, funding labs at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It closed the Pittsburgh lab in 2018.
Disney’s ongoing research on AI
Disney’s U.S. research group has developed a mixed-reality technology called “Magic Bench” that allows people to share a space with a virtual character on screen, without need for special glasses.
In Switzerland, Disney Research has been exploring AI, machine learning and visual computing, according to its website. It has spent the last decade creating “digital humans” that it describes as “indistinguishable” from their corporeal counterparts, or fantasy characters “puppeteered” by actors.
This technology is used to augment digital effects, not replace human actors, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Its Medusa performance capture system has been used to reconstruct actors’ faces without using traditional motion-capture techniques, and this technology has been used in more than 40 films, including Marvel Entertainment’s “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”
“AI research at Disney goes back a very long time and revolves around all the things you see being discussed today: Can we have something that helps us make movies, games, or conversational robots inside theme parks that people can talk to?” said one executive who has worked with Disney.
Opinion on task force on artificial intelligence
Hao Li, CEO and co-founder of Pinscreen, a Los Angeles-based company that creates AI-driven virtual avatars, said he worked on multiple research papers with Disney’s lab while studying in Zurich from 2006 to 2010.
“They basically do research on anything based on performance capture of humans, creating digital faces,” said Li, a former research lead at Disney-owned Industrial Light & Magic. “Some of these techniques will be adopted by Disney entities.”
Disney Imagineering last year unveiled the company’s first initiatives in an AI-driven character experience, the D3-09 cabin droid in the Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser hotel, which answered questions on a video screen and learned and changed based on conversations with guests.
“Not only is she a great character to interact with and always available in your cabin, which I think is very cool, behind the scenes, it’s a very cool piece of technology,” Imagineering executive Scott Trowbridge said at the time.
