beep boop Mar. 10, 2023

Your Move, M3gan

Portrait of Jennifer Zhan

By Jennifer Zhan, a Vulture news blogger covering music, internet culture, and TV.

Photo: Errich Petersen/Getty Images for SXSW

Life imitates art, we suppose: During a Friday panel at South by Southwest, Disney introduced a roller-skating bunny as a demonstration of the company’s efforts to make 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 at Avengers Campus, explained that they’ve been incorporating motion capture data so that robot “performances” can have “emotion embedded in them.” In a video shared by TechCrunch editor-in-chief Matthew Panzarino, Dohi asks, “Can we make an audience actually feel anxious for our little robot here if we ask her to premiere her big stunt in front of this huge South by Southwest crowd?” He then watches as the bunny bot — in lieu of an official name, let’s call her J2dy H0pps — falls on her face to prove that she can easily pick herself back up. Pope lifts her onto his shoulders, where J2dy sits calmly until it’s time for her to wave her goodbyes to an applauding audience. If J2dy ever decides to start taking dance lessons, she just might pose a real threat to a certain killer doll’s brand. M3gan could not immediately be reached for comment.

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