This is the world's most realistic lightsaber.

And I'm holding it because today I got the chance to go behind the scenes with Walt Disney Imagineering.

The place where Disney brings their craziest ideas to life.

From stunt robots, to a real-life version of The Force, to these adorable little droids.

On this show, we explore how technology can improve people's lives by living longer, going farther.

But the reason that I've loved Disney since I was a kid is that they use tech to improve lives a different way.

By making people happy.

And that means that they're pushing forward what tech can do in some really crazy, unexpected ways.

So let me take you inside the magic to show you the cutting-edge tech that Disney is building, how it really works, and what happens when we put it to the test.

Let's do this.

This is what we call our Imagineering department, where we dream up our new projects.

Oh, that's cool!

When Walt Disney started building Disneyland, he needed people to help him build rides and robots and castles, every aspect of this new kind of park.

He needed people who would think outside the box.

Their job was to imagine ways to bring the magic of Disney to life.

So Walt called them Imagineers.

Today, the Imagineers have built these legendary parks all around the world, and they constantly come up with new ideas for them, here, in their research and development lab.

Let's take a walk through R&D.

This way.

Let's take a walk through R&D.

Come on with us right this way.

We have some friends we want you to meet.

These are the latest and greatest BDX units.

Hello, how are you?

Can I give you a little boop?

Go for it.

For this show, I've gotten to meet some very cool robots that can walk over uneven ground, or get pushed, or even open doors.

But what makes these droids different is their personality.

They're just so cute.

And that cuteness comes down to a bunch of very specific design and engineering decisions, from how this robot walks to how it does this little shimmy.

These droids aren't autonomous.

They're told exactly where to go by a person holding this console.

So, of course, I wanted to try it.

Okay, so I'm gonna do a little dance.

I'm gonna move his head around.

Can I try tantrum?

You can, absolutely.

Yeah.

How do I ask him to walk?

Tap and then move the stick forward or any direction.

Hi!

It's important to understand that I'm telling the droid what to do.

Walk here, throw a tantrum.

But I'm not telling it how to do that.

The actual way that it responds to me comes down to its training.

Using ducklings as inspiration, Disney Imagineers created a series of animations, like in a Disney movie, for how the robot should walk, or jump, or shimmy.

Then they put a digital version of the robot into a simulation.

Most of the time when robots are trained this way, they're given a goal, and then they're rewarded based on how well they meet that goal under different circumstances.

So, for example, walk from A to B over different terrain.

This is reinforcement learning.

So we actually have some live training going on on our computers right now.

So that's what you're seeing here is the thousands and thousands of robots trying different things, stumbling a little bit, and trying something different.

In this case, though, the droids are rewarded not just for walking from A to B, but also for how closely they follow the animations while they do that.

In these digital worlds, they can get way more reps than they would in the physical world, and they don't get damaged.

Then the Imagineers upload that training to the physical robots, and they test them with these cute little harnesses, until eventually the droids are ready to go out into the world all on their own.

Well, with help.

These are not the robots that are most likely to be doing your laundry or working in a factory in the future.

But their design means that they're on the cutting edge of robotics in a different way.

In a world that uses more and more robotics, how we feel about something, whether or not we feel something is cute, whether we feel something is well-intentioned as opposed to scary, matters a lot for how much humans want to interact with robots.

And that also must make the development, I mean, probably more fun, but also by definition more difficult, because the reinforcement learning has two objectives.

It has don't fall, but it also has be cute about it.

That's what's really challenging about a lot of Imagineering projects, is we don't want our guests to see technologies, we want them to fall in love with a character and feel things.

I did feel things.

It's hard not to love these little droids.

If you want to know more about how they're made to look so real, my friend Michelle Carre is making a video all about what it takes to become an Imagineer for her show Challenge Accepted.

And if you're really lucky, you might spot these droids walking around in a Disney park.

Eventually, though, I had to leave my new friends.

I have to go now.

Bye, guys.

Because I have something else to try.

We have made the most realistic, expandable, extendable lightsaber ever.

That's Lanny Smoot.

He's one of the world's most famous Imagineers.

He holds over 100 patents, including for this lightsaber.

I'm going to allow you to extend and retract it.

Now, this is a very expensive prop.

Now, this is a prop, so we're going to be very careful with it once it's extended.

And this is the button that you push to extend it.

I'm going to stand back just so that...

So I just...

Oh, yeah, just that.

Oh, that's cool.

This felt as cool as I thought it would.

And it looked as real up close as it does on camera.

In the Star Wars universe, of course, these Jedi weapons work by channeling energy through a crystal to create a blade that can cut through basically anything.

In our universe, filming the Star Wars movies, actors used these fighting prop sticks, and then visual effects artists painstakingly added the glow in post-production.

But for Disney Parks, they somehow needed to make lightsabers real.

And that was Lanny's job.

How does it work?

So the challenge when you're making a prop for a performer is that it has to look like what we see in the movies.

And you remember in the movies, you know, slashing, the light extends, it can cut through all sorts of things.

Well, we don't cut through all sorts of things, but we did want smooth extension of the blade.

It's that smooth extension that isn't possible with lightsaber toys that I've seen before.

Our lightsaber unrolls from internal motors that are pushing it out.

And that was important for our performers to really look like Jedi knights.

The lightsaber has a clear cap with two long translucent tapes attached to it.

That unroll from inside the lightsaber, allowing it to extend upward.

As they extend out of the hilt, the tapes bend into a concave shape to create a rigid blade.

And on those tapes are a series of bright LEDs.

They had to program those LEDs to make that realistic lightsaber glow.

It knows what angle you're moving through.

And it's going to blink its lights a little bit to give it the feeling that it has moved from place to place.

And we're also strobing it a little bit in general to give the life of flickering power.

If two people have them, can the blades touch each other?

This one is not used for battle.

We have a stand-in for it when we have to have our stars moving it around quickly.

This is more for the extension and retraction.

So I should not, I should not touch it.

Much like a real lightsaber.

Yes, you don't want to get burned, right?

Of course.

Even though I now understood how they were doing this, it still felt like magic.

Like you can see the kid in me is just mesmerized.

And just when I thought I couldn't feel any more powerful, they showed me how to use the force.

And of course you can go left and right if you like.

This is so cool!

You're strong with the force.

I can't keep a straight face, I'm sorry.

All right, there you are.

That's a serious Jedi.

Yes.

I take my responsibilities seriously.

But hang on, how am I doing this?

First, that camera right there is recording my hand movements from above.

And there's another bit of magic on the floor.

Hang on a sec.

So I just got back from the UK where I was training to drive a real Formula E car.

No joke.

And while I was there, I was also using the sponsor of this episode, Surfshark.

Surfshark is a virtual private network, or VPN, which means that when I'm traveling, I can make my computer think that I'm somewhere else.

I really like that because I want being online to feel like I'm still at home, even when I'm traveling so much for this show.

I want my streaming shows to still show up.

I want things to automatically be in dollars.

I want shipping to be in the United States.

Those kinds of things.

But then when I get home, I sometimes want my computer to think that I'm somewhere else.

This is really useful when I'm sitting here at this desk doing a lot of research for Huge If True episodes.

Sometimes I want to see government sites from another country or things like that.

I just go to Surfshark like this, and then I set my location to one of a hundred different places so I can be anywhere in the world still at home.

If you don't use a VPN, you might find it useful.

I know I do.

If you want to try it, they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.

And for the Huge Crew, for you guys, they're offering four extra months for free if you use my link, which is surfshark.com slash Clio.

It's also in my description.

Go check it out.

Now, back to Disney.

This is Disney's famous hollow tile, also invented by Lanny.

It's basically a treadmill, but in any direction.

I've been wanting to try this since I saw my friend Marques walk on an earlier version.

All right, I'm ready.

So I just walk in a circle.

It's like I'm drifting back toward the center a little bit.

Up close, you can see that the floor I'm walking on is made of these rotating circular tiles like this.

One gear on the bottom controls overall spin, and another on the top controls the angle of the head.

What that means is that your shoe is only ever hitting the top of that angled disc.

So I'm standing on the surface that's created by the edge, and that edge might also be moving.

And that creates motion back toward the center that I feel is just the ground sort of moving me back.

So as you're walking in one direction, the spin of the top of the angled discs pushes you together in the opposite direction.

So I can walk backward.

I can walk forward.

And what's interesting is it feels like...

I don't know how to describe this exactly.

It doesn't quite feel exactly like a treadmill in every direction.

It takes a little bit of learning, but it very clearly wants me...

If I walk in a circle, it's sort of pushing.

You can see my foot.

Every step is drifting back toward the center.

But wait, how does it know which way I'm going?

Well, this entire surface is surrounded by lidar cameras that are constantly scanning your feet.

One camera at floor level identifies where your foot is on the tiles.

So it's tracking each step in real time.

And then there's a second camera that's looking at the direction of your foot.

It does that by identifying not only where your foot is, but also where your shin bone is.

So if your shin is at the back of your foot, then you're facing this way and vice versa.

This demo had six different lidar angles, so at least one of them always had a good view of my feet.

Each of these has a different view.

That one may be a little confused there, right?

This one has a very clear view that your ankle is in the back of your foot here.

Interesting.

Or you don't need to walk at all.

You can move the floor with a video game controller.

Yeah, this was really fun.

And above all, that is the point of the holo tile.

It's fun.

They're not really sure how they're going to use it in the future.

Right now, Imagineers are testing designs on it and playing games.

While we were there, they implied that they might end up using it in a park or maybe in a movie, like in the volume where they film Star Wars.

But right now, fun is enough.

And speaking of fun, I have one more thing to show you.

These are stuntronics, meaning they're robot stunt doubles.

This is how Spider-Man launches over Disneyland.

We wanted a larger-than-life Spider-Man performance, but some of these flips that you see done in the movie, that's just CGI.

We have to do it in real life, and those would not be safe for a stunt performer to be doing once, much less several times a day.