For audiences at the fair, and in the early years after it was moved to Disneyland, Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln was spectacular. Lincoln looked around at the audience, he stood, gestured, and even tapped his finger nervously on the arm of his chair before the show.

It is unlikely that the attraction has as much impact today. Back then, Mr. Lincoln was unique. Today animatronics can be found everywhere—at most theme parks and museums, in casinos, shopping malls, upscale toy stores, and even in some supermarkets in the Northeast.

Most of the animatronics built today use pneumatic cylinders instead of the hydraulic system that powered Mr. Lincoln. And these days, most animatronics use digital control systems instead of the analog system that Disney used.

But despite the fact that materials developed for the aerospace industry give builders far more options today to manage heavy characters, for high-end animatronics the technology of choice has not really changed. Some of the materials that manufacturers use are somewhat different, although builders still use analog controls when they need complex animation, and hydraulics still work best for animating heavy characters. But just over the horizon are new technologies that could launch a new era in animatronics.

Digital Animation
It could be argued that the new era has already arrived. Improvements in computers and digital technology over the past eight years have enabled animatronics builders to take their control systems for granted, says Nick Farmer, the managing director of Farmer Studios. “When I started there was always the fear that when you switched the equipment on in front of the client it wouldn’t run. You don’t even think about that now. Everything is so reliable that it allows you to think about other things.”

It’s certainly cheaper, says Bob Crean, the vice president of Advanced Animations. “Audio systems and control systems are getting less and less expensive. We are doing things today that would have been impossible three years ago. With mp3 technology, called solid state memory, you can put your data and audio on a tiny piece of material and slip it into the control box. Ten years ago we were using cassette tapes and more recently, CD-ROMs.”

And it just keeps getting better, says Walt Conti, the president of Edge Innovations, a company that specializes in high-end animatronics for movies. “It’s also processing power. The fact that computing power doubles every 18 months means you now have a lot of computational power that is very affordable and very small.”

All this digital technology has enabled Sally Corp. to operate up to 32 characters with one controller in its latest attractions, says Ray Dominey, Sally’s technical director. The company uses a system adapted from stage productions to send out signals to receivers in each character. The receivers convert the signals into the digital commands that animate the figures.

And the digital age is helping reduce design costs, too, says Crean. “We have laser-scanning capabilities in-house that allow us to scan a scale model into a 3D CAD (three-dimensional computer-aided design) system for designing the mechanics.” In the past, nothing could be done until the full-size shell of the figure was complete. “Some have tried to design the inside first, but it usually ends in disaster.” Now, he says they are able to create parts of the animatronics concurrently. With the CAD system they are able to start designing the mechanics while the (full-size) sculpture is being developed.

Making It Move

Systems for full-motion animatronics have advanced, too. The ultimate goal for any animated figure, of course, is to create the illusion that the creature is actually alive. Achieving this presents something of a paradox for designers, Farmer says. “Movement has to be carefully thought out so it gets seen. Yet, the most subtle actions can be those that make it seem most alive.”

Real creatures also move at various speeds and angles, and this presents a challenge to animatronics builders. Digital controls are either on or off—there’s no in-between. To overcome this, builders have tried lots of approaches. A company called Works Unlimited varies the air pressure in pneumatic systems to change the rate of motion, says Bo Sherman, the president. “You can double the pressure for double the speed, or you can flutter a valve and make the motion seem to pause halfway.”

And to vary the range of motion, Sherman may put two cylinders back to back. “You can use a one-inch stock cylinder, and they see the arm move 20 or 30 degrees, and then you can activate the two-inch stock, and you get a 45-degree range of motion.”

Advanced Animations has come up with what it calls Advanced Inertial Management, which uses very sophisticated shapes to absorb shocks as the character moves. Lately the company has been adapting “variable durometer” materials, which can vary their hardness for use with its AIM system.

Edge Innovations is using electric servomotors to animate its high-end figures. Edge created an animatronic dolphin with startling realism. Requiring just a thin umbilical command cord, the dolphin swims at speed up to eight knots.

But the dolphin uses analog—not digital—controls. For all of digital’s reliability and low cost, its “all-or-nothing” limitation cannot match analog for producing realistic motion.

But this could change. New systems for moving characters are in the works that could bring animated figures the most realistic motion ever. One promising technology is the development of “artificial muscles.”

“They’re similar to a Chinese finger puzzle over a rubber tube,” Crean says. “As you inflate the tube it gets fatter and the distance between the ends gets shorter.” Artificial muscles may also be possible with new plastics that are being developed, says Garner Holt, the president of Garner Holt Productions, which is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary this year. “They react to an applied voltage and contract,” Holt says. “There are several different materials out there that do similar things. They are in the early stage of development but they are very much like a human
muscle. We’re hoping that a number of these things that are being developed and investigated can ultimately apply to animatronics.”

Artificial muscles would give animatronics designers a whole new approach to building characters. “The geometry is totally different,” Crean says. “You would be building animatronics like the real thing, with spinal cords and multiple joints.”

A New Animatronic Experience

Although technology could change the way animatronics are built, the bigger challenge is to change the way guests experience animatronics. Typically, guests are passive. They sit and watch and are entertained. But with animatronics being so common, passive entertainment alone is proving less and less likely to thrill an audience, with the exception of figures on a truly grand scale such as the 65-foot-long Ursula figure that rises over guests in the Mermaid Lagoon Theater at Tokyo DisneySea. “Animatronics are not as unusual today as they were 20 years ago,” Sherman says. “Kids are smarter these days and you have to work harder to impress them.”

To restore interest, some builders are making interactive animatronics that allow guests to control the characters. Works Unlimited has created animated dinosaur skeletons for museum guests to operate. “People put money in and they get to press the buttons and control the device,” Sherman says. “There are multiple buttons with different actions, and they have different sounds, so they can come up with different arrangements of motion to make the character do different things.”

COSI Studio, which uses animatronics in attractions that it designs, just finished installing an animatronic version of the Hollywood Squares tic-tac-toe game show at the Sunrise Museum in Charleston, W.Va. “There are two touch screens, and guests become contestants,” says Allen Boerger, a principal with COSI. “There is a moderator, a Groucho Marx character, who asks the celebrity animatronics questions, and the guests have to agree or disagree with the answer. If they are correct, they win the square. It’s in a room that accommodates 60 people so it’s a show as well. It allows some to be observers and others to play.”

But some builders say that animatronics need to go further if they are to again captivate guests. Sherman can see the day when animatronics controls are guided by how the audience reacts to the character. “It would be similar to computer games, where what you do changes the way the game progresses.”

This will require animatronics that can sense the guest. Advanced Animations has been working with a company that uses robot technology developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We have been working on some artificial intelligence modules,” Crean says. “Five years out, I think you will see truly interactive animatronics that can engage people and recognize colors, sizes, and genders—not anything near human intelligence, but a great entertainment device. “It’s a computer. We envision marrying that with a human animatronic and it could be a gas. It could be hilarious.”

Disney is already taking steps in this direction. Walt Disney Imagineering is working on an interactive animatronic dinosaur that will walk around and interact with the guests, but it’s still in development and the company isn’t saying much.

How and when animatronics make the leap to lifelike independence and realism is, in many ways, out of the hands of the companies that make animatronics. Typically, they have to wait for the technology they need to be developed by other industries. As it moves out of the lab and into production, they adapt it for their needs. Conti says the technology that the Segway Personal Transporter uses to balance riders on two wheels could be used to give animatronic characters the ability to balance and react to their environment. And voice recognition technology will allow animatronics to be controlled by voice, Holt says. “We are waiting to see how it gets refined,” he says. “But once it gets to the point where it can be used, we’ve looked into it.”

An attraction such as The Amazing Adventures of Spiderman at Universal’s Islands of Adventure has brought a new level of thrills to guests through the use of holograms. But projected images can never take the place of animatronics, says Dave Mauck, the manager of entertainment systems for Oceaneering International Inc. “The nature of people is to connect with the real thing. To make dinosaurs come to life and to make science fiction characters come to life, you can only go so far with a visual system.” Conti adds, “No matter how good that hologram is, it is not a physical being sharing your space . . . Having a truly physical animatronic come to life is a very magic thing, if it is done correctly.”

Conti remembers seeing Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln as a child. “That’s what got me doing what I’m doing today, and that’s the point. Recapturing that kind of feeling is what needs to done. For animatronics to continue to be a viable form of entertainment they have to evolve because everything else is evolving.” People have become much more computer savvy with the array of products available to them on the market today, and many animatronic manufacturers don’t think it’s good enough to try to entertain guests with machines that just look like humans, but don’t emulate the way they move and talk. “The goal should be to create a performance that exceeds the visceral expectations of the audience.”