Jun 2024

Projection mapping, computer vision, 3D reconstruction, and real-time tracking for Walt Disney Imagineering R&D.

Overview

From 2023 to 2024 I worked as a contractor at Walt Disney Imagineering’s R&D group in Glendale on computer vision, 3D reconstruction, and real-time tracking systems.

Most of this is under NDA and i really don’t want Disney to sue me so I’ll just post obviously public information and photos. Some of the work I did was related to these projects, or maybe the code found its way in there. The R&D group is very separated from what actually happens at the park and spends most of their time making prototypes.

I basically spent a lot of time combining really nice industrial vision cameras and projectors with really expensive GPU clusters to make magic.

from disneytouristblog Probably the most visible project to come out of R&D was these walking droid trained with simulated reinforcement learning. These guys were super cool. I did not have anything to do with this but they were sometimes walking around my desk area.

from disneytouristblog

Obligatory photo of lanny and the holotile floor. I was tangentially involved in this one. I worked on a couple of projects with Lanny, what a legend.

Moana: Journey of Water

One of the more public displays of the tracking tech we built was in Moana: Journey of Water at EPCOT. This attraction uses real-time sensing for the park guests to control the water!

Patents

Disney loves to patent things… I pretty quickly got involved in a patent for tracking laser beams. You can probably google the rides at disneyland that involve laser beams…

U.S. Patent Application No. 18/389,346 — High Frame Rate Light Beam Collision Detection (2025). View on Google Patents

A second patent application for Interactive Sensing Techniques is also in progress. I am pretty excited about this one!

Tools

Python, C++, OpenCV, PyTorch, ONNX, OpenVINO, COLMAP, Nerfstudio, ROS, Docker, Linux, DINO-ViT