Disney teams with CMU on entertainment technology

The Mouse is coming to Pittsburgh.

Disney and Pixar Animation Studios President Ed Catmull announced today at a major computer graphics conference in Los Angeles that his company will team up with Carnegie Mellon University and a Swiss institute to create research labs to design entertainment technology.

Seven or eight researchers and their assistants will work at Disney Research in Pittsburgh, at CMU's Oakland campus.

CMU professor Jessica Hodgins, who heads the university's Motion Capture Lab, will be director of the operation. Its first task will be designing ways to make autonomous robotic characters that can entertain crowds at Walt Disney World and the corporation's other parks, she said.

"Entertainment applications are really appealing because they're hard, and also because they can give people a lot of pleasure and be a lot of fun," Hodgins said.

Disney will also open a laboratory at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, to research animation and computer vision.

Joe Marks, vice president of research for Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development, will oversee the labs. He declined to say how much money Disney will spend on the labs, which initially will operate under a five-year committment.