Disney invited us to its Imagineering offices to meet the incredibly impressive next-generation robotic figure of Olaf that will soon be walking, talking, and interacting with guests at World of Frozen in Disneyland Paris and Hong Kong Disneyland, and it truly felt as if we were getting a glimpse of the future of immersive entertainment at Disney Parks.
First revealed last year alongside a new episode of We Call It Imagineering, Olaf just made another big appearance on stage at NVIDIA GTC 2026, only a few days after we had that chance to see him face-to-snowman-face.
And what a meeting it was. Alongside posing with Olaf and asking him if he'll be in Kingdom Hearts 4 (hey, we tried!), we were just taken aback by how lifelike he was. As time went on, it's almost as if we forgot he was a robot, as his motions and mannerisms felt just as right as any real-life Disney character that you'd find walking around a park.
Every single piece of this Olaf worked so beautifully together, and it made him feel alive. Every time he giggled, the rest of his body was in tune with the happiness the laughter brought. We also couldn't get over the tiny, little iridescent fibers woven into his snow body that made him very shiny in person and looked like pure magic.
Many of these feelings were echoed by the Imagineers we spoke with about this new tech that, in their words, is really all about story and emotion.
"We're not building robots, we're building characters," Josh Gorin, Executive, R&D and Disney Live Entertainment Innovation, told us. "Disney's a company based on this idea of animation, which is the illusion of life through movement. So for us, that is absolutely key. We took animation training data from the actual animators who worked on the Frozen films, who worked on Olaf, to not only train him how to walk and balance, but how to walk, balance, and move like Olaf. And when you combine that with the participation of Josh Gad, who recorded a bunch of custom lines just for this robot, you're able to create Olaf in Arendelle."
What also makes this iteration of Olaf special is its use of reinforcement learning through simulation. To further explain this point, we have to bring in the adorable BDX droids from that beloved galaxy far, far away. As it turns out, these bipedal Star Wars droids were responsible for a change in Gale's winds at Disney that led to us talking about Olaf today.
"The BDX Droids represented this shift to reinforcement learning," Gorin said. "The idea that instead of hand animating every possible move, we could actually train a robotic character to move and interact in a uniquely Disney way. And that's the same pipeline, the same technology that we used for Olaf.
"We designed a mechanical system and then created a true digital twin inside a 3D engine. So, everything down to the motors, the wires, and the screws, were all meticulously modeled in 3D and then brought into a physics simulation where, over time, Olaf learned how to walk in the same way we learned how to walk through trial and error."
Olaf's learning doesn't end there, though. Earlier on in development, Olaf's footsteps were a lot louder than the team anticipated. In the past, they would have to go back to the drawing board and re-engineer the hardware or come up with some type of creative solution. With reinforcement learning, they were able to teach Olaf how to walk quieter in an even more remarkable way.
"What we were able to do is program Olaf to pay attention to how hard his foot was hitting the ground, and we just asked him to learn to walk quieter," Gorin said. "With that, he could keep all those same uniquely Olaf animations, but now walk quieter. We could never do that before, but now you can run that request millions and millions of times in the physics engine and you get a more quietly stepping robot."
And the learning won't stop there. We were told the BDX droids were already undergoing their fourth revision, and the team is taking the feedback they get from seeing them in the wild to make them even more realistic. This mantra will, of course, extend to Olaf.
"Over time, we'll build up what Olaf can do and what he can say," Gorin shared. "I think that's something that's important for our guests to sort of understand is we can use these characters in so many different ways. For example, this first Olaf will not be appearing in the rain, but he is tuned for the heat of Paris and of Hong Kong. But, as we get better and they get better, we'll start to put them in newer and different places.
"So, the hope is that the way you see him today won't be exactly the way you see him tomorrow. I think an important note is that we don't just stop. We don't just build it and say, 'That's it.' These are characters that we're going to continue to work on, to develop, to advance."
This should give hope to the many, like us, that hope Olaf will one day be walking the streets of Disneyland and/or Walt Disney World. While the team didn't have anything to announce to us about the potential of an Olaf World Tour, they did not slam the door on the possibility.
"We would love Olaf to be everywhere, but it's one step at a time," Gorin cautioned. "We've already announced he'll be opening World of Frozen at Disney Adventure World in Paris. He'll then shortly thereafter be making appearances as one of the citizens of Arendelle in Hong Kong Disneyland, and then who knows where he'll go next."
What the team was ready to confirm, however, is that Olaf won't be the end and that their ambitions are even greater.
"We've had a lot of one-off robots so far, and you can expect that you'll start to see the franchises coming together to be able to have these robots interacting with one another, which would be kind of the next part of the experience," Kyle Laughlin, SVP, R&D and Technology and Engineering, said.
While all this tech is undoubtedly impressive, it's all in an effort to bring us closer into these stories we hold closest to our hearts.
It's about bringing these characters to our guests and paying off the promise of what Disneyland was created to do.
"Reinforcement learning has allowed us to speed up that process of programming," Laughlin said. "And now we get to focus on the things that bring Olaf to life and create that emotional connection to our guests. That's where we're spending all of our time and trying to bring the artist's intent from the animation, from the film, to guests everywhere around the world."
"It's about bringing these characters to our guests and paying off the promise of what Disneyland was created to do, which was to create a world where you could step in and live out these stories and become a part of them in a way you couldn't anywhere else," Gorin added.
For more, check out everything else you need to know about World of Frozen at Disneyland Paris in 2026, how Disney updated the Elsa, Anna, and Kristoff Audio-Animatronics in Frozen Ever After, how Imagineering is bringing Star Wars experiences to life, and what it was like visiting Imagineering to get a sneak peek at the first-ever Walt Disney Audio-Animatronic that is now part of Walt Disney – A Magical Life at Disneyland.
Adam Bankhurst is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AdamBankhurst, Instagram, and TikTok, and listen to his show, Talking Disney Magic.
