Walt Disney Imagineering has created a brand-new transforming Audio-Animatronic debuting today on Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland.

New Pirates of the Caribbean Animatronic

Tech Radar got an exclusive first look at the animatronic in Walt Disney Imagineering’s R&D lab. The animatronic body uses classic technology while the face is a 3D-printed shell with no visible moving parts. The expression is created by a high-fidelity projection system mapped onto the surface of the face.

With this tech, the character’s face transforms from a living human to a skeleton with no cuts or edits.

This is a new version of the ride’s iconic pirate skeleton sitting atop a pile of treasure.

Leslie Evans, Executive R&D Imagineer at Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development told Tech Radar’s Jacob Krol, “We’re really going after more tools to just tell stories in an incredible way.”

Evans said they chose Pirates of the Caribbean to showcase this new tech because the team was “looking for a figure where creatively we could do a great transformation,” and decided “this pirate transformation would be a great, great first place to do it.”

“When you really had animatronic technology, real-time game engines, and incredible CG assets all together… that’s when we said, wait, we’ve really got something here,” Evans said, calling the technology “a very exciting tool.”

“We want them to believe it’s real… we’re trying to make people feel,” she added. “We don’t build technology for technology’s sake. Everything is about telling a great story to our guests.”

Disney collaborated with Epic Games for the Audio-Animatronic. It uses the company’s Unreal Engine 5 for REAL-TIME projection mapping as the figure moves.

As explained in the Walt Disney Imagineering video below, the story of the pirate is that he picks up a cursed gold coin, freezing himself in time. He then drops the coin, releasing him from the curse. But his greed takes over, he looks back at the coin, and he freezes — again, locking himself in a loop.

Pirates of the Caribbean reopens on Friday after a refurbishment that began in early May.

How do you hope to see this kind of advanced projection technology used on other Disney attractions? Let us know on social media!

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