This isn’t the first video I have put up about the amazing engineering work being done at Disney Studios, but this one is definitely the most visually…unsettling.

This video describes the development of a “lifelike gaze system” for human-robot interactions. They present a general architecture that seeks not only to create gaze interactions from a technological standpoint, but also through the lens of character animation where the fidelity and believability of motion is paramount; that is we seek to create an interaction which demonstrates the illusion of life.

In its current state – it looks a little too like something right out of a Terminator movie; but I think I can see where it’s going. Imagine fully clothed (and with rubber skin) animatronics you can interact with or narrate to you at one of their installations.