Photo: Errich Petersen/Getty Images for SXSW
We guess life imitates art: During a Friday panel at South by Southwest, Disney unveiled a roller-skating bunny as a demonstration of the company’s efforts to create robots that can have an “emotional connection with our guests.” Ah yes, because that concept turned out so well in m3gan! Tony Dohi and Morgan Pope, the Imagineer duo responsible for the backflipping Spider-Man robot in Avengers Campus, explained that they’ve been incorporating motion capture data so that the robot’s “performances” can have “embedded emotion.” in a video shared By TechCrunch Editor-in-Chief Matthew Panzarino, Dohi asks, “Can we really make an audience eager for our little robot here by asking it to debut its big stunt in front of this huge South by Southwest crowd?” He then watches as the robot bunny, instead of an official name, let’s call her J2dy H0pps, lands on his face to show that she can get up easily. Pope lifts her onto her shoulders, where J2dy sits quietly until the time comes. for her to say goodbye to an audience that she applauded. If J2dy ever decides to start taking dance lessons, she could pose a real threat to the brand of a certain killer doll. M3gan could not immediately be reached for comment.
