(bright music) - [Marques] Okay, I got
to see something really, really cool. I got to visit some of the secret labs inside of the Walt Disney Company called the Disney Imagineering Labs. So, you know, I've seen some people talk about them a little bit before, but obviously Disney has
all these attractions, and theme parks, and rides, and somebody has to design
and engineer all that stuff. And there is a surprising amount
of tech that goes into it. And some of it is still
experimental and unreleased, where no one outside of Disney, well, except for me now,
has got to use them. This thing is so cool. So Disney Imagineering has
a bunch of these buildings scattered around this
California neighborhood that I got to visit, where they make realistic
animatronic robots as part of their attractions. They literally greeted me at the door with these little droids, the same ones that are roaming
around the theme parks. And these things have a
striking amount of similarities to the Boston Dynamics Spot robot that I got to play with a few years ago. You know, that Spot robot was
able to navigate any terrain with an adaptive gait, and it followed
instructions from a custom, but surprisingly easy to learn controller so that it could navigate around and do jobs that humans won't. And it's also super fun to play with. These little droids for the theme parks are a lot of the same stuff. They are able to adapt to any terrain, they walk around, they follow instructions from a customized steam
deck as a controller, which took me like 60 seconds to learn, and they can navigate
around relentlessly all day, interacting with guests at a theme park and being fun to play with. It was super fun. And it's also seriously
crazy how much tech is even inside one of these things. It's literally, it's blending
all these animations together from the walking, to the
standing and looking around. It's pretty cool. But that's not even
what I was there to try. I was there specifically to be the first person outside of Disney to walk on the HoloTile. So you might've seen
some videos about this. The HoloTile. It's this insane, one of
one, 360 degree treadmill, like a moving floor basically. It's still in an experimental phase and this is the only one that exists, but it's already got these
gears turning in my head about future potential
applications, particularly in VR. And actually one specific thing that I have reservations about, but I'll get to that in a minute. Now, I don't know that anyone's
actually fully explained exactly how this thing works yet, but you can see that they're
basically walking across a huge number of these
tiny, one inch discs that are spinning on top of their bases like a bunch of tiny treadmills and then turning to match the
direction that you're walking. So obviously a normal treadmill
is one direction, right? Just one flat plane moving
forward and spinning around. So you always know exactly
where you're going. But let's say you want
to build a treadmill that's responsive and
can go in any direction. Well a flat treadmill, it would be really hard, right? It would have to spin around quickly to match direction you're walking, which is just kind of insane. So instead built into the floor is a bunch of articulating cones with discs on top of them, with motors inside to spin those discs. Okay, and then the key here
is the discs are tilted. So only the edge of the disc in the air is the part that's actually
touching what's on the floor. So it's less of a flat treadmill and more of a bunch of small blades that are rotating under your feet. So when you walk forward, they spin clockwise to move
your foot back to the middle once it's landed. And actually when you walk backwards, they been counterclockwise to move your foot back to the middle. So no matter where you go,
whatever direction you walk, no matter how long or
how fast your stride is, it'll always pull you
right back to the middle. So I've seen these videos
that Disney's put out of this guy walking on it, but we gotta work our way up to that. You know, I've never walked on it before and it's capable of some other things. So let's graduate, let's get there. So there are three ways
to control this thing. There is walking on it, obviously, but there's also using a controller, like a PlayStation 5 controller. And there's also just
straight up using the force and just pointing at it with your hands. Let's start there. So first we put this
apple box on the HoloTile. And there's a screen up here that shows in real time all of the inputs and what the sensors are seeing, both on the floor and around the floor. And they've actually mapped anything that crosses a certain line in front of me to move whatever object is on the floor. So when I move my hand
in front of that line, the program moves the floor
around to match the movement of the object with the
movement of my hand. And this is pretty sick. I assume everyone watching
this has seen Star Wars and realizes how dope it would be to have something like this in some sort of Star Wars experience in a theme park. So this is already super cool, but then the first time I actually get to get on the HoloTile
myself is in a chair and with a PlayStation controller. So I'm gonna be in a chair where the chair is on a piece of wood so it's just flat bottom, and then they just handed me
the PlayStation controller. And, well, see for yourself. - Yup. - [Speaker] 3, 2, 1, enable. (tiles rustling) (tiles rustling) - [Marques] So the left joystick is mapped to control position, and the right joystick controls rotation. So you can spin around,
and move around freely, and actually get pretty
quickly used to this thing. And if you're wondering, yes, I can steer myself
completely off of the floor, it would let me, I was just
kind of trying to be careful to not fling myself off the edge. But it moves so fast. (tiles rustling) So now after all that, now that I've experienced how it moves, now they're gonna let
me walk on the HoloTile. - All right, so I'm gonna
start with training mode, which is a fraction of the normal speed, but will still get me
used to how this works. So, I'm ready. - [Speaker] 3, 2, 1, enable. - [Marques] Training mode is on. So now, slowly start to walk. I can feel them kind of
wiggling a little bit, but not really moving too quickly yet. So this is normal. Oh, okay, now they're starting to move and my feet are starting
to move with the tiles. There we go. So as I slowly walk a little bit faster, a little bit more quickly,
a little longer strides, I'm getting more used to
the feeling of the tiles. So they designed this to be
about a two minute process as these tiny tiles slowly speed up their responsiveness to my movements. And it was slowly turned up more and more, basically until it was at a
hundred percent real time. It's moving pretty close to
full speed now feels like. And there's obviously a learning curve, but I feel like I'm good enough at it that I can kind of walk
around and not think too hard. Feels good. And then there's all the
data behind me in real time. Showing my feet, my legs. So walking on this, I
noticed a couple things. First of all, as you've
heard through this video, it's pretty loud. Like this is gonna be something they definitely are gonna wanna work on, especially if it's something that'll be a part of a theme park someday, or maybe even in someone's home. But also, I found it fascinating, you're never actually quite walking in a perfectly straight line. Like, it can feel pretty close if your foot happens to
line up along a row of discs that are all aligned in
a way from the center. But other times you're
just kind of gliding over the top of a bunch of these ridges and you're not moving in
a perfectly straight line. I imagine a future version of this looks like a whole bunch of much smaller and more numerous discs that are just as powerful as they are, which is clearly an engineering challenge, or an Imagineering challenge. So yeah, this takes some getting used to. I know that because I got to hang out with the inventor of the
HoloTile, Lanny Smoot. He's been at Disney
for more than 20 years. He's got more than 70 patents, including the way the BB8
rolls around the park, the real life lightsabers,
just to name a few. He's kind of a legend. And, yeah, this guy's incredible on it. He was showing me that
you can have two people on it at once, and they were playing a
multiplayer racing game, like controlling a BB8
eight around a course by jogging around. And it seemed to work pretty well, aside from being pretty small. Obviously this would work better if they had more of these floor tiles. But then what I found the most crazy is using this floor with a VR headset on. So this is what you would
expect it to be for, for VR, right? And there's been some other 360-degree treadmill
type of videos I've seen, other types of inventions used for VR. And they work, but the one thing that's hard about these, and it's hard to explain through video, but the difference
between what your eyes see and what your body and brain
feel, that disagreement. So meaning like, this
has always been true, if you look down at your phone
a lot in a moving car, right? Your eyes are seeing something still, they see your body sitting still, but then your brain and your inner ear feels you moving around, moving forward. And so the disagreement
between what your eyes see and what your brain feel, that's what can give you motion sickness. That's what feels bad. And so if you think about
it, it's the same thing with this moving treadmill in VR. You put the headset on
and you start walking, and your eyes see that you are walking
down a moving hallway, you're moving forward. But your brain, because
you're walking in place, doesn't feel that it's
supposed to be moving forward. So again, there's a disagreement there. So with the HoloTile, I got to try putting
on an Apple Vision Pro and actually walking around
a 3D constructed environment. You can't see it, but
I'm in like a holo deck in Star Trek or something, and I've got a harness
on because it turns out this is really hard. My eyes see the movement, and my legs are trying to walk forward, and my feet are sliding around, but my brain thinks I'm not
supposed to be moving forward. So, it's confusing. It's hard to just trust it and walk. Plus there's the extra layer of sometimes it moves you
backwards a little bit to the center. So I was taking all these baby steps. Meanwhile though, watch Lanny do it, and he's just incredible at it. Like he had the headset on, he was walking around
confidently through space, exploring a virtual world. Pretty sure it's like a virtual Disney theme park type of thing. But that's the type of thing that feels the most like the future. Just freeform, exploring some huge space, walking around, in the comfort of your own home maybe. And that would be amazing. And if this thing can
continue to be developed, maybe, just maybe, it can get us closer to
that reality someday. Either way, that is definitely dope tech. I'm glad I got to see the
first version of this, and I'm very curious and
excited to see future versions. Disney, please invite me back. I wanna see what the future
of this actually looks like. Okay, that's it. Thanks for watching. Catch you in the next one. Peace. (bright music)
