Jake doesn't talk, so he's more like R2-D2.
He uses sounds and colors and lights to communicate.
He's got an eye.
Yellow, he's happy. Blue, he's sad. Red, he's angry.
Gray is, "Please, leave me alone." [laughs]
Jake definitely has his own personality, and you can't help but love him.
When you get to meet him and see him, and he's happy to see you,
it's a great feeling.
Jake is a prototype. We've play-tested him in Disneyland's Tomorrowland.
-Millions of guests got to see him. -[laughing]
So, how are you feeling about the design, Tanner?
I think the unreasonable ideas are the ones that we get most excited about.
Okay. Is there anything...
Things that we think are impossible or outlandish,
we do whatever we can to make that happen.
The day that he went live outdoors I was jumping, screaming, laughing.
[droid beeps]
[Girdich] Having a character roaming around freely, people were blown away.
Everyone was trying to find how he was being controlled.
He was his own character, without a puppeteer in the background.
When we were play-testing Jake in the park,
we had a couple of children who would put their hands on his shoulder
and just walk right alongside him.
They see him as their friend and immediately take to him.
Kids would come up and just give him a hug.
Sit, wrap their arms around him. They would give him a kiss.
-[child] Hold me! -[Girdich] And you realize the power
that these characters have to inspire wonder.
Hi.
-[chuckles] -[droid beeping]
[Girdich] We're constantly updating him.
And right now, what we're trying to do is refactor some of his code
so that he can work a little bit better than he has in the past.
More responsive, more reliable.
I want him to last forever.
You have to be resilient to try and introduce new things into the park
and find ways to solve challenges.
We would love to have our characters speak what we call natural language processing.
In the technology terms, it's still very difficult,
and especially in a theme park environment.
Very interesting challenge.
So, we'll see, we'll see. [chuckles] We're working on it.
My dream would be to reintroduce some of our characters
the way they are on the screen, straight into our parks.
Dreams are incredibly important, I think,
because they can unify us to go after something
that, alone, we might have not been able to do.
Living out your dreams in the way that our guests do in the park
really is a different way of saying,
"I can create something I never thought could exist in the physical world."
[woman] Ellen, you're not seeing the droid.
[Girdich] When you think about what the outcome is of your work,
it's millions of faces smiling.
I love this guy.
It's a great reason to get up every morning.