HiLOS ANGELES -- Mr. Lincoln, your future could be in the hands of a dinosaur.
Walt Disney created a sensation at the New York World's Fair in 1964 when he introduced the world's first fully animated human figure in "Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln."
The audio-animatronic Lincoln quickly became a fixture at Disneyland and later at Walt Disney World's Hall of Presidents in Orlando.
Now, nearly 40 years later, Disney's Imagineers have fashioned a prototype of the next generation of audio-animatronic figures that's a far cry from Walt's childhood hero.
In fact, it's a 20-foot-long smiling dinosaur named Lucky that is fully mobile and can interact with guests -- through the help of a hidden operator. The creature, which grunts, hisses, bats his eyelashes and even signs autographs in the shape of a clover, madehis debut test-run at Disney's California Adventurelast week.
The new technology underscores a growing push by Disney, the world's largest theme-park operator, to find new ways of engaging customers by offering more intimate, interactive experiences. It also comes at a time when the entertainment giant is struggling through an industrywide slump that has eroded profits in its cornerstone theme-park business.
"In our business, you can't rest on your laurels; you've got to constantly invent what the future is," said Tom Fitzgerald, senior creative executive for Walt Disney Imagineering. "Walt always wanted his characters to live and breathe -- this is a natural evolution of that."
Someday, Disney says, Mr. Lincoln himself could be overhauled with the latest in audio animatronic technology, which would give him the ability to move off the stage to which he is now confined.
Disney won't say where or when it will roll out Lucky and other similar characters, because they're still in the experimental stage. But the company says the technology behind Lucky opens up vast new entertainment possibilities for characters to interact with customers in live shows and during random encounterson Main Street.
"Something like this has never been done before," said Burbank, Calif.-based theme-park consultant Bob Rogers, who has done work for Disney in the past. "It opens up new possibilities for all of us in the theme-park industry."
Lucky is part of a new generation of audio-animatronic figures that incorporate the latest in computer and battery technology to break free from the bounds of their equipment, becoming both mobile and portable.
Other figures include an animatronic Meeko, the raccoon character from the Disney animated movie Pocahontas,which made a limited appearance during a live show at Disneyland last year. Walt Disney World earlier this year introduced Pal Mickey, a talking doll that can be rented for $8 a day and serves as a park guide.
As part of this "Living Characters" initiative, Disney Imagineers also last year introduced an attraction at California Adventure featuring a virtual Stitch from the movie Lilo & Stitch. Stitch appears as a virtual character on a video screen and talks to kids through a telephone.
Shrouded in secrecy at Disney's Imagineering division in Glendale, Calif., the Lucky project has been five years in development.
Unlike the old animatronic figures that operated by hydraulics, Lucky is operated by electric motors and sensors that are controlled through a central computer, which regulates everything from the booming "thud" that accompanies Lucky's footsteps to the batting ofhis eyelashes.
Paramount was taking steps to make the creature safe for parkgoers, engineers said. One of the early hurdles was figuring out how to keep the 12-foot-tall, 450-pound beast upright. Designers stabilized Lucky, who is fashioned from foam latex, by fasteninghim to a flower-filled cart that conceals a human operator.
The operator oversees Lucky's controls, enablinghim to respond in real time to human interactions through a series of preprogrammed actions, including sneezing and signing autographs. Another person, dressed as magician, guides the dinosaur ashe lumbers through the crowds.
Lucky is patterned after the Gallimimus dinosaur, but designers took some liberties to softenhis image sohe wouldn't scare children. To capture the right movements, engineers crawled on the floor to simulate movements and consulted with animators who worked on Disney's digitally animated movie, Dinosaur.
"The biggest challenge was how do you go from a blank chalkboard and a bunch of hardware to a child petting a dinosaur that he believes is real," said chief designer Bruce Vaughn, vice president of research and development at Walt Disney Imagineering. "There was nothing we could look at to compare this to."
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Sebastian Horacek alias Coasters
) nicht nen Joystick in der Tasche hat? 
