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A floor that feels like magic? Just another marvel from this legendary Disney inventor
Many of Lanny Smoot’s best-known inventions are, at least to nonengineers, more like magic tricks. Floating disembodied heads, a lightsaber that actually expands, retracts and glows and, in his latest sleight-of-hand, a reinvention of the floor. Yes, a floor.
Smoot at 68 is the most accomplished modern inventor at the Walt Disney Co., headquartered in Burbank. Working within Imagineering, the company’s secretive arm devoted to theme park experiences, Smoot creates feats of science that often appear to guests like illusions. With 106 patents throughout his career and counting — Smoot is quick to lean forward and tell me that he is nowhere close to done — his career has been one that proves the applied sciences can be just as much a creative field as a technical one.
For the record:
2:01 p.m. Feb. 1, 2024Photographer Christian Thompson was mistakenly credited as Christian Thom.
Lanny Smoot, inventor of Disney’s HoloTile technology, has 106 patents to his name.
(Christian Thompson / Disneyland Resort)
His innovative new floor, a creation years in the making, recently was shown to audiences, tucked away inside Imagineering’s Glendale research and development space. Though it does not yet have a designated use in Disney’s theme parks or other experiences, it’s a thing of versatility, and it’s easy to imagine the possibilities.
Think of a treadmill, only one that works with you rather than against you — twisting, turning and moving in the direction of your body — without traditional confines. Disney calls it the HoloTile Floor, and it’s essentially in communication with you, allowing you to move in any direction and never stumble off of its surface. One clear use is virtual reality, as now, inside a headset, one isn’t in danger of strolling into a rail or a couch. But it’s more than a gaming device.
Multiple people can walk — or dance — on Smoot’s HoloTile, allowing for inventive choreography in a stage show, for instance. Anyone, Smoot points out, can “moonwalk” on the HoloTile. Or objects can be directed to roll in the direction of a guest’s choosing, with demonstrated movements recalling some of the magnetic abilities of the Force from the “Star Wars” franchise. Set a chair on the HoloTile and it instantly becomes a ride vehicle, as an operator can spin it or pull it forward. I imagined, for instance, the furniture of “Encanto’s” Casa Madrigal suddenly springing to life once guests were strapped in.
Like many of Smoot’s well-known inventions, it’s not just a technical achievement but a delight. Smoot recently was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, part of a 2024 class that included, among others, Asad Madni, whose safety and stability breakthroughs are common in cars and have been put to use by NASA, and Andrea Goldsmith, a pioneer in high-speed wireless communications. Smoot’s hall of fame selection is a testament to the power of entertainment, and that designing for large-scale communal spaces such as theme parks can inspire the sort of wonder that can improve lives.
“I know a lot of electrical engineers now, and I ask them how they got started. They say, ‘Oh, I kept taking things apart,’” says Smoot, sitting in a modest office at Disney’s research and development campus. (Just outside his door sits a training pod for robots in development, where Imagineers have been testing bipedal droids that can hop in place, bow their heads and nudge and prod humans as if they are robotic pets.)
“I was a little bit different,” Smoot continues. “I figured out how they worked before I took them apart, and what components may be inside them that I could take out and make my own things. I think that’s part of what causes creativity. Not that I want to see someone else’s thing. I want to see my own thing.”
And when it came to the HoloTile, Smoot wanted to see something from one of his favorite television franchises brought to life. He talks eagerly of “Star Trek,” noting how important it was to him as a child growing up, he says, in poverty in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville. It was Nichelle Nichols’ communications officer Uhura, Smoot says, who partly inspired his career path. “I was a fan of ‘Star Trek’ partially because of the technology, but because I saw a Black character, Uhura, who did technological things,” Smoot says.
Lanny Smoot joined the Walt Disney Co. in the late 1990s and currently has 106 patents.
(Christian Thompson / Disneyland Resort)
His love for “Star Trek” never waned. Smoot says the HoloTile began not so much as a solution to any particular problem Disney needed to solve but as him wondering whether it could be possible to create a “Holodeck,” where in the sci-fi universe real-world settings are brought to life via holograms.
“I knew about the thing called the ‘Holodeck,’ which is where people can walk around forever in a room that’s 24 feet by 24 feet,” Smoot says. “They’re going off to distant mountains and streams. How can that possibly be, right? It must be that the floor of the ‘Holodeck’ has the ability to move people in any direction, to allow them to walk in any direction, to prevent them from bumping into things like the walls of the room or each other. It made me think. How do you have a moving surface that allows you to walk on it forever in any direction? The joke I make is that if you are on it, and someone leaves the room and doesn’t take you off, you will starve to death. That was the spark.”
As it developed, so did its potential uses.
“He really wanted to solve the ‘Holodeck’ problem,” says Bobby Bristow, who has long worked closely with Smoot at Disney. “He wasn’t quite sure how to get there. It started with multiple iterations — very different technology in the beginning. It wasn’t until we got the version that we have now where we were like, ‘We can also use it to do this.’ We can do all these other things. It’s not just moving people it unlocks but also objects. We’re excited for internal people to tell us what other uses they could have for it.”
It may be some time before guests are able to use or witness Smoot’s HoloTile in a theme park, but plenty of Smoot’s work is scattered around Disney’s locations. Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, for instance, is home to a seance room, one in which a crystal ball houses the head of Madame Leota as she conjures the spirits shown in the attraction. Madame Leota floats, patiently hovering above a table as she calls forth the apparitions. This was a Smoot trick, added to the Mansion in 2004, and he won’t reveal the secrets of how it works but notes the solution was part engineering feat and part illusion.
Lanny Smoot is credited with finding a way to make Madame Leota’s head float in the Haunted Mansion.
(Joshua Sudock / Disneyland Resort)
Smoot also remade the the portraits in the Mansion’s entry walkway. Here, the imagery flickers between the mortal world and more forbidden realms — ghostly knights, ships, catlike creatures. “The prior changing portraits required a roomful of equipment,” Smoot says. “It was a complex effect. My effect was so much smaller, and it gave the Mansion an instant change during the lightning. As soon as the lightning hits, the portraits change.”
Other Smoot inventions at Disney parks around the world: At Florida’s Epcot, Smoot concocted a former exhibit called “Where’s the Fire?” that challenged guests to uncover hazards by utilizing a flashlight that acted as an X-ray-like device, an installation that sprang from a tool Smoot created that allowed people to see through walls. He also worked on that park’s interactive scavenger hunt, the now-retired “Kim Possible: World Showcase Adventure,” and more recently devised a realistic “Star Wars” lightsaber that simulated the look of an illuminated, retractable blade, which many online patent hunters have compared, in simplified terms, to a sort of reverse tape measure.
The lightsaber was featured in the short-lived but beloved Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser. Smoot, for his part, is reticent to talk details, preferring to keep his secrets, well, secrets. “It was a fun thing to do,” he simply says of the lightsaber.
Lanny Smoot says a love of “Star Trek” inspired his career.
(Disneyland Resort)
He’s more comfortable instead discussing his career as if it’s a lifelong hobby. Smoot’s journey took him initially to Bell Labs, where he worked on early video teleconferencing tech, before beginning talks with Disney in 1998. The firm at first sought Smoot’s advice on camera mechanization that allowed for on-demand view changes for Florida’s Animal Kingdom park. “The company tried out the panning camera — all good — but it turns out they liked the inventor even more, and I was literally pulled into the Walt Disney Co.,” Smoot says.
He credits his love of invention to his father, and speaks of early science experiments as if they are toys. When he was 5 years old, Smoot says, his father brought home a battery, an electric bell and a lightbulb. “I’m sitting there at the table, and he puts them together and he gets the bell ringing,” Smoot says. “This was like magic. Then he gets the light lit. I say this is poetic, but it’s true. It lit the rest of my career. I was locked into science, mostly electricity.”
Disney, he says, has been such a good fit because he’s constantly amazed at how his technology gets hidden by the company’s staff of artisans and architects.
“I always say my stuff works,” Smoot says. “That I guarantee. It may not be the best-looking, but it works. It’ll get there.”
Now, what to do with a ‘Holodeck’ floor? Smoot and his team teased creations such as an interactive dance floor, but there’s room for more — a restaurant, say, in “Coco’s” Land of the Dead in which we rotate among tables, a “Turning Red” show in which Mei in red panda form can move buildings, an exhibit in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge in which we can become one with the Force. Reimagine the floor, and there’s no ceiling on the possibilities.
A screenshot from George Mélière’s Gugusse et l’Automate. The pioneering French filmmaker’s 1897 short, which likely features the first known depiction of a robot on film, was thought lost until it was found among a box of old reels that had belonged to a family in Michigan and restored by the Library of Congress.
The Frisbee Collection/Library of Congress
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The Frisbee Collection/Library of Congress
The Library of Congress has found and restored a long-lost silent film by Georges Méliès.
The famed 19th century French filmmaker is best known for his groundbreaking 1902 science fiction adventure masterpiece Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon).
The 45-second-long, one-reel short Gugusse et l’Automate – Gugusse and the Automaton – was made nearly 130 years ago. But the subject matter still feels timely. The film, which can be viewed on the Library of Congress’ website, depicts a child-sized robot clown who grows to the size of an adult and then attacks a human clown with a stick. The human then decimates the machine with a hammer.
In an Instagram post, Library of Congress moving image curator Jason Evans Groth said the film represents, “probably the first instance of a robot ever captured in a moving image.” (The word “robot” didn’t appear until 1921, when Czech dramatist Karel Čapek coined it in his science fiction play R.U.R..)
“Today, many of us are worried about AI and robots,” said archivist and filmmaker Rick Prelinger, in an email to NPR. “Well, people were thinking about robots in 1897. Very little is new.”
A long journey
Groth said the film arrived in a box last September from a donor in Michigan, Bill McFarland. “Bill’s great grandfather, William Frisbee, was a person who loved technology,” Groth said. “And in the late 19th century, must have bought a projector and a bunch of films and decided to drive them around in his buggy to share them with folks in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York.”
McFarland didn’t know what was on the 10 rusty reels he dropped off at the Library of Congress’ National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Va. A Library article about the discovery describes the battered, pre-World War I artifacts as having been, “shuttled around from basements to barns to garages,” and that they, “could no longer be safely run through a projector,” owing to their delicate condition. “The nitrate film stock had crumbled to bits on some; other strips were stuck together,” the article said. It was a lab technician in Michigan who suggested McFarland contact the Library of Congress.
“The moment we set our eyes on this box of film, we knew it was something special,” said George Willeman, who heads up the Library’s nitrate film vault, in the article.
Willeman’s team carefully inspected the trove of footage, which also contained another well-known Méliès film, Nouvelles Luttes extravagantes (The Fat and Lean Wrestling Match) and parts of The Burning Stable, an early Thomas Edison work. With the help of an external expert, they identified the reel as having been created by Méliès because it features a star painted on a pedestal in the center of the screen – the logo for Méliès Star Film Company.
A pioneering filmmaker
Méliès was one of the great pioneers of cinema. The scene in which a rocket lands playfully in the eye of Méliès’ anthropomorphic moon in Le Voyage dans la Lune is one of the most famous moments in cinematic history. And he helped to popularize such special effects as multiple exposures and time-lapse photography.
This moment from George Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) is considered to be one of the most famous in cinematic history.
George Méliès/Public Domain
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George Méliès/Public Domain
Presumed lost until the Library of Congress’s discovery, Gugusse et L’Automate loomed large in the imaginations of science fiction and early cinema buffs for more than a century. In their 1977 book Things to Come: An Illustrated History of the Science Fiction Film, authors Douglas Menville and R. Reginald described Gugusse as possibly being, “the first true SF [science fiction] film.”
“While it may seem that no more discoveries remain to be made, that’s not the case,” said Prelinger of the work’s reappearance. “Here’s a genuine discovery from the early days of film that no one anticipated.”
Joshua Jackson
I Got the Eye of the Tiger!!!
Published
BACKGRID
Joshua Jackson may have picked up a thing or two from “Karate Kid: Legends” … we got video of him going H.A.M. in a boxing gym with a trainer.
Watch the video … the 47-year-old actor ditched his shirt for the workout, really working up a sweat as he bobbed and weaved in the ring while throwing in some pretty impressive jabs!
He later goes to work solo on a speed bag like an old pro.
Joshua has publicly said that starring in “Karate Kid: Legends” in the role of a former boxer was a dream for him, but there’s no word on whether he’s training for another role or just really fell in love with boxing.
Either way … you’re looking great, Joshua!
Tracy Morgan, left, and Daniel Radcliffe star in The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins.
Scott Gries/NBC
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Scott Gries/NBC
Tracy Morgan, as a presence, as a persona, bends the rules of comedy spacetime around him.
Consider: He’s constitutionally incapable of tossing off a joke or an aside, because he never simply delivers a line when he can declaim it instead. He can’t help but occupy the center of any given scene he’s in — his abiding, essential weirdness inevitably pulls focus. Perhaps most mystifying to comedy nerds is the way he can take a breath in the middle of a punchline and still, somehow, land it.
That? Should be impossible. Comedy depends on, is entirely a function of, timing; jokes are delicate constructs of rhythms that take time and practice to beat into shape for maximum efficiency. But never mind that. Give this guy a non-sequitur, the nonner the better, and he’ll shout that sucker at the top of his fool lungs, and absolutely kill, every time.
Well. Not every time, and not everywhere. Because Tracy Morgan is a puzzle piece so oddly shaped he won’t fit into just any world. In fact, the only way he works is if you take the time and effort to assiduously build the entire puzzle around him.
Thankfully, the makers of his new series, The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, understand that very specific assignment. They’ve built the show around Morgan’s signature profile and paired him with an hugely unlikely comedy partner (Daniel Radcliffe).
The co-creators/co-showrunners are Robert Carlock, who was one of the showrunners on 30 Rock and co-created The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Sam Means, who also worked on Girls5eva with Carlock and has written for 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt.
These guys know exactly what Morgan can do, even if 30 Rock relegated him to function as a kind of comedy bomb-thrower. He’d enter a scene, lob a few loud, puzzling, hilarious references that would blow up the situation onscreen, and promptly peace out through the smoke and ash left in his wake.
That can’t happen on Reggie Dinkins, as Tracy is the center of both the show, and the show-within-the-show. He plays a former NFL star disgraced by a gambling scandal who’s determined to redeem himself in the public eye. He brings in an Oscar-winning documentarian Arthur Tobin (Radcliffe) to make a movie about him and his current life.
Tobin, however, is determined to create an authentic portrait of a fallen hero, and keeps goading Dinkins to express remorse — or anything at all besides canned, feel-good platitudes. He embeds himself in Dinkins’ palatial New Jersey mansion, alongside Dinkins’ fiancée Brina (Precious Way), teenage son Carmelo (Jalyn Hall) and his former teammate Rusty (Bobby Moynihan), who lives in the basement.
If you’re thinking this means Reggie Dinkins is a show satirizing the recent rise of toothless, self-flattering documentaries about athletes and performers produced in collaboration with their subjects, you’re half-right. The show feints at that tension with some clever bits over the course of the season, but it’s never allowed to develop into a central, overarching conflict, because the show’s more interested in the affinity between Dinkins and Tobin.
Tobin, it turns out, is dealing with his own public disgrace — his emotional breakdown on the set of a blockbuster movie he was directing has gone viral — and the show becomes about exploring what these two damaged men can learn from each other.
On paper, sure: It’s an oil-and-water mixture: Dinkins (loud, rich, American, Black) and Tobin (uptight, pretentious, British, practically translucent). Morgan’s in his element, and if you’re not already aware of what a funny performer Radcliffe can be, check him out on the late lamented Miracle Workers.
Whenever these two characters are firing fusillades of jokes at each other, the series sings. But, especially in the early going, the showrunners seem determined to put Morgan and Radcliffe together in quieter, more heartfelt scenes that don’t quite work. It’s too reductive to presume this is because Morgan is a comedian and Radcliffe is an actor, but it’s hard to deny that they’re coming at those moments from radically different places, and seem to be directing their energies past each other in ways that never quite manage to connect.
Precious Way as Brina.
Scott Gries/NBC
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Scott Gries/NBC
It’s one reason the show flounders out of the gate, as typical pilot problems pile up — every secondary character gets introduced in a hurry and assigned a defining characteristic: Brina (the influencer), Rusty (the loser), Carmelo (the TV teen). It takes a bit too long for even the great Erika Alexander, who plays Dinkins’ ex-wife and current manager Monica, to get something to play besides the uber-competent, work-addicted businesswoman.
But then, there are the jokes. My god, these jokes.
Reggie Dinkins, like 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt before it, is a joke machine, firing off bit after bit after bit. But where those shows were only too happy to exist as high-key joke-engines first, and character comedies second, Dinkins is operating in a slightly lower register. It’s deliberately pitched to feel a bit more grounded, a bit less frenetic. (To be fair: Every show in the history of the medium can be categorized as more grounded and less frenetic than 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt — but Reggie Dinkins expressly shares those series’ comedic approach, if not their specific joke density.)
While the hit rate of Reggie Dinkins‘ jokes never achieves 30 Rock status, rest assured that in episodes coming later in the season it comfortably hovers at Kimmy Schmidt level. Which is to say: Two or three times an episode, you will encounter a joke that is so perfect, so pure, so diamond-hard that you will wonder how it has taken human civilization until 2026 Common Era to discover it.
And that’s the key — they feel discovered. The jokes I’m talking about don’t seem painstakingly wrought, though of course they were. No, they feel like they have always been there, beneath the earth, biding their time, just waiting to be found. (Here, you no doubt will be expecting me to provide some examples. Well, I’m not gonna. It’s not a critic’s job to spoil jokes this good by busting them out in some lousy review. Just watch the damn show to experience them as you’re meant to; you’ll know which ones I’m talking about.)
Now, let’s you and I talk about Bobby Moynihan.
As Rusty, Dinkins’ devoted ex-teammate who lives in the basement, Moynihan could have easily contented himself to play Pathetic Guy™ and leave it at that. Instead, he invests Rusty with such depths of earnest, deeply felt, improbably sunny emotions that he solidifies his position as show MVP with every word, every gesture, every expression. The guy can shuffle into the far background of a shot eating cereal and get a laugh, which is to say: He can be literally out-of-focus and still steal focus.
Which is why it doesn’t matter, in the end, that the locus of Reggie Dinkins‘ comedic energy isn’t found precisely where the show’s premise (Tracy Morgan! Daniel Radcliffe! Imagine the chemistry!) would have you believe it to be. This is a very, very funny — frequently hilarious — series that prizes well-written, well-timed, well-delivered jokes, and that knows how to use its actors to serve them up in the best way possible. And once it shakes off a few early stumbles and gets out of its own way, it does that better than any show on television.
This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.
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