Featuring Dawson Dill, an inspiring individual

Right before the explosion of AI, there was an "intelligent character personality" released as a "playtest" in Disney's, now defunct, Star Wars hotel immersive experience. This character was (is?) called D3-09. An animated protocol droid character that guests could interact with via a screen in their hotel room. With the power of speech recognition and natural language processing, guest would as ask questions about their experience and story and D3-09 would respond in a conversational way. Even with AI becoming more ubiquitous, D3-09 is still an inspiring approach in achieving scalable AI character interaction in an immersive experience.

Dawson Dill was the creative lead for the development of D3-09. He, and the team of imagineers working on this AI concierge droid character, inspired my current project of making a multi-sensory AI as part of an hyper personalized onboarding/pre-show to a much larger role-playing game in a fictional universe. My hope is the MAI experience will evolve into a scalable way to break the 4th wall and pull in participants and guests in a more personal way. Today, only a short three years later, I am able to utilize at home AI STT, TTS with voice cloning, efficient distilled LLMs, and advanced computer vision. We are moving at hyperspeed toward AIs that are spatially aware and multi-sensory.

Beginning his career at Walt Disney Imagineering in 2011 as an Advanced Development intern, he focused on graphic design and video. Over the years, he advanced to the role of Senior Research & Development Imagineer, where he played a pivotal role in pioneering interactive experiences. He also contributed to Disney and Khan Academy's collab "Imagineering in a Box" providing insight in the theme park design, creating immersive worlds, attractions, and characters.

When speaking of artificial intelligence with WDWNT, Dawson Dill said, “I think that we see an opportunity with some of this technology to make more personalized connections and have ones that are more also connected to an evolving story. …more and more immersive storytelling…having characters that take different forms and want to engage in those same persistent ways, you’re going to need a platform like this.”

“At the Imagineering R&D group, we’ve been working on this platform…it can bring a lot of different Disney characters of life in different ways, on different mediums and different platforms.”

D3-09 is a remarkable achievement and should be lauded more as a significant milestone in technological immersive design. Clearly there are exciting goings on at Disney's Imagineering R&D Group and we should all be excited for the next releases of this platform for intelligent & personalized characters, and I will be sure to keep a look out for other experiences designed by Dawson Dill!