Ahead of his debut at Disneyland Paris on March 29, Olaf, the self-walking, free-roaming robotic character created by Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development, appeared at this year’s NVIDIA GTC, the biggest AI conference of the year for developers, researchers, and business leaders. During the GTC Keynote presentation, NVDIA CEO Jensen Huang was joined onstage by Olaf.
We caught up with Kyle Laughlin, SVP, Research & Development and Technology & Engineering at Walt Disney Imagineering to explore the technical advancements the team accomplished in the last few months, before Olaf joins the kingdom of Arendelle at the brand-new World of Frozen.
Now that Olaf is about to make his guest-facing debut at World of Frozen, what obstacles did R&D face in advancing Olaf’s movements and how were they overcome?
We’ve been hard at work to make sure Olaf is ‘show ready.’ He is such a unique character — he is made of snow, moves in non-physical ways, and he has snowball feet. Olaf will be debuting at World of Frozen as part of the daily Celebration in Arendelle show, which takes place on a boat in the lagoon. This meant he had to learn to balance on an unstable surface. Through deep reinforcement learning, in just a matter of hours, he earned his sea legs.
Tell us about the continued work you’re doing with NVIDIA and Google DeepMind, specifically the progress on the Kamino simulator Disney Research developed.
The Kamino simulator is a GPU-accelerated physics solver designed for accurate simulation of complex mechanical systems. Kamino enables large-scale reinforcement learning by running thousands of parallel environments on a single GPU, including inhomogeneous worlds where each environment can contain a structurally different robot. Deep reinforcement learning through simulation allowed Olaf to learn to stand and walk in challenging environments, like on a boat, in a fraction of the time it would take a human child.
Are there plans to use Kamino to develop and train new robotic characters? Are there specific characters you’re excited to explore next?
Kamino is designed for simulating complex mechanical systems that go beyond simple kinematic trees, which are basically maps of connections that inform the ways in which the robots move. If you think about all the tools in our Imagineering toolbox, Kamino is another that will help us solve real world problems and physical challenges. The speed at which we’re able to create new characters — and get them in front of our guests — is unprecedented. We are working to bring more emotive, expressive, and surprising characters to guests at our parks and ships around the world.
Read more about Olaf and Disney’s robotic character platform in our November 2025 interview with Kyle about Episode 7 of We Call It Imagineering and catch the full episode on the Walt Disney Imagineering YouTube Channel and Disney+.