The science of entertainment is getting more complicated. Disney Research in Zurich and Walt Disney Imagineering at Cornell are working on Physical Face Cloning to be able to create animatronics characters that behave with the precision of a human face.
First, they are designing a synthetic skin that can mimic the movements and tendencies of human skin. How the skin on a face reacts to motions such as talking has been problematic, but the Disney team hopes that a silicon based solution guided by computer simulations will be the answer. Here are two videos that they recently released showing the progress of the research.
