Earlier this week, The Walt Disney Family Museum hosted a virtual program as part of their “Continuing Walt’s Legacy” series, featuring Imagineer Lanny Smoot, who talked about his career full of inventions both at and before Disney. This year, Smoot was inducted to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, becoming only the second person from Disney to do so, after Walt himself. Below is a recap of the event, covering some of the more interesting and creative things Smoot has worked on.
Smoot began the program by giving an introduction to Disney, what he does with the company, as well as what he did before working at Disney. With over 100 patents to his name, Smoot is one of the most prolific Black inventors in American history – a feat that began with his prior work at Bell Laboratories and Bell Communications Research. In 2020, Smoot’s expertise in theatrical technology earned him the esteemed title of TEA Master.
The Imagineer discussed a number of projects he worked on since joining Disney over 25 years ago. One of the first was an interactive koi pond at the Crystal Lotus restaurant in the Hong Kong Disneyland Hotel, a virtual screen of koi fish that reacts as guests walk over it. A similar project was Power City in Project Tomorrow, the post-show to Spaceship Earth at EPCOT. This game allows guests to move around a digital object on the floor with a stick, but only the stick causes a reaction, and not the guest’s feet.
Perhaps Lanny’s most prolific additions to the parks have taken place within the walls of The Haunted Mansion. He was the man who figured out how to get Madame Leota to float off her séance table, as well as improving the changing portraits throughout the attraction to have the technology completely contained within the portrait, instead of being controlled by a room full of equipment as was previously the case. These changes came into effect in 2004 at Disneyland, as newer changing portraits were added to the Attic scene alongside the new Bride.
Some of the other projects Lanny has worked on include the projection technology used in the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage, the impressive lightsabers used at the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser and the Kim Possible World Showcase Adventure at EPCOT, among others. Another project at EPCOT was Innoventions’ Where’s the Fire? – where families would go into a model home and use X-ray flashlights to make an image that you saw through the walls, teaching you safety hazards. The Imagineer was particularly proud of this technology, as it was said to positively spread awareness about fire safety.
But as is quite often the case at Imagineering, not all projects come to fruition, for a variety of reasons – one of those being no feasible place to include it. One of these such projects was a zoetrope of sorts created on a ping pong ball, with increasingly larger facial movements moving towards a smile or an open mouth, but each one is different as it spins around a little device.
One of Smoot’s most recent inventions is the HoloTile floor, the world’s first multi-person, omni-directional, modular, expandable, treadmill floor. Users can plug into a virtual reality headset to explore and walk through any environment, without leaving their spot on the floor. He noted that a fellow Imagineer used the system to virtually walk through a currently in-development area. Using this, the Imagineer was able to realize that certain things needed to be tweaked, such as making a pathway wider or putting trees somewhere to hide a sightline.
Smoot ended his presentation by talking a bit about how he grew up and what opportunities, and mistakes shaped his life path. Lanny was an inventor from a young age, seemingly picking up the bug from his father, who was an itinerant inventor himself. At the age of 5, when his father brought home a battery, a bell, and a bulb to hook them up, Lanny knew he had to work with electricity. From there, he explained his college and career path, before giving some advice for up-and-coming Imagineers and inventors.
If you want to hear more from this presentation, the folks at The Walt Disney Family Museum have uploaded the program in full on their YouTube channel, which you can watch below.
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