Disney Debuts First Projection-Mapped Face On An Audio-Animatronic

The next generation of Audio-Animatronics is no longer a concept. Disney has put its new projection-mapped face technology into a Disney theme park attraction for the first time, and it shows up in one of Disneyland’s oldest scenes. The skeleton pirate atop the gold in Pirates of the Caribbean contains the first projection-mapped Audio-Animatronic face for a Disney theme park attraction. What he can do now wasn’t possible on any Disney figure before this.

Disney’s First Projection-Mapped Audio-Animatronic Face Debuts at Pirates of the Caribbean

What Just Debuted at Disneyland

The figure on top of the gold in scene 11 of Pirates of the Caribbean is the same greedy pirate guests have passed for 59 years, frozen as a skeleton. Disney has now brought him to life using a new hybrid system that pairs a traditional animatronic with a real-time projected face. It is the first park installation of the next-generation Audio-Animatronics technology Imagineering revealed last year.

Disney frames the result as the character’s full backstory. In its announcement, Imagineering said the new technology lets the pirate show a story guests never saw, calling it “the story that’s been there all along.” The story runs as a loop: the pirate finds a single cursed gold coin, the spell freezes him the moment he picks it up, his arm later drops the coin and frees him, and his greed pulls him back to grab it again. Imagineering describes three distinct moods that carry him through that cycle.

At the time, Disney named characters that could benefit, including Mike Wazowski, Lightning McQueen, and Hades, and fans wondered whether the tease pointed toward Monstropolis, Piston Peak National Park, or Villains Land. The Pirates figure is the answer to the most basic open question from that reveal: where the technology would show up first. It debuted in a classic scene rather than a new land.

How the Projection System Works

The system layers two technologies. A traditional animatronic figure handles the physical motion, while that figure’s animation data feeds in real time into Unreal Engine, a result of Disney’s ongoing partnership with Epic Games. The projected media reacts to whatever the figure does. The hard part is the surface, since Disney is projecting onto a moving figure and moving objects rather than a flat screen. The team says it developed and patented a new technique to keep the image aligned every time, and in the walkthrough video, an Imagineer slides the projected face off the figure to prove it is a projection, then moves the figure by hand while the image tracks it precisely.

Calibration is where the project shines. A camera system in the scene normally needs visible targets to locate an object, but the heavily costumed pirate did not lend itself to that, so Imagineering built the calibration markers directly into his bandanna. Those markers stay invisible to guests. They activate under UV light, so the system calibrates at night when the markers glow yellow, and the UV lights switch off during the day. The scene uses two projectors, with only one active at a time, and the second standing by as a backup. Disney also built redundancy into the tracking itself, so even if a motor fails and the figure moves incorrectly, the projected face stays aligned.

As always, keep checking back with us here at BlogMickey.com as we continue to bring you the latest news, photos, and info from around the Disney Parks!