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While much of the United States is experiencing a long winter, in Glendale, California, it’s another story. It was a sunny, warm afternoon at Walt Disney Imagineering R&D in mid-March, and it was the perfect place to meet summer-loving snowman Olaf from the Disney Frozen franchise.
Olaf – in robotic form and set to appear in the parks – made its debut last week in Los Angeles and is now on display at Nvidia GTC 2026 AI Conference In the San Francisco Bay Area.
Watch this: I Met Disney’s New Robot Olaf (Sneak Peek)
Olaf will join Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on stage during his keynote on Monday at the opening of the company’s annual technology conference. The robotic snowman runs simulations on Nvidia GPUs and is powered by Nvidia chips. Olaf was revived using… Newton’s physics enginean open source system developed by Nvidia, Google DeepMind, and Disney Research that enables high-performance robotics simulations to run quickly on GPUs.
It’s very similar to the autoroamers developed by Walt Disney Imagineering that you can find Edge of the Star Wars Galaxy In both Disneyland And at Disney World, Olaf will wander around the theme parks greeting and interacting with guests.
He assisted the animators at Walt Disney Studios Create training data He used to teach Olaf to walk in imitation – not just to walk, but to mimic the snowman’s distinctive shuffling.
When CNET senior producer Jesse Orrall interacted with Olaf during a press preview at Imagineering R&D HQ last week, the AI-powered robot was controlled by an operator. His vocal responses were chosen by that operator, and he was somewhat limited in what he could say. Olaf can also follow a scenario as part of the show, with plans to expand these capabilities over time.
“We’ve had our sights set on creating a realistic Olaf for a long time,” Josh Goren, Disney’s executive director of research and development, told Oral. “Technology has finally caught on.”
He lamented that you can’t give warm hugs to Olaf the robot just yet – though Disney admits he’s very huggable and hopes that will change.
Iridescent fibers woven into Olaf’s body give him a sparkling snowy appearance. His mouth and eyes are fully articulated, while his stick arms, carrot nose, buttons, eyebrows and hair are magnetically attached, allowing for character gags from which his body parts can be pulled out and reattached.
Olaf will make his debut on March 29 with the opening of the world of Frozenland at Disneyland Paris and will later appear at Hong Kong Disneyland. There’s no word yet on when the beloved Snowman might appear in the U.S. at Disneyland or Walt Disney World.