Robot dolphins are here to Free Willy and revolutionize marine

theme parks
Edge Innovations is a company that truly lives up to its name. As such, it's made an
animatronic dolphin so real, the company already has high hopes of replacing actual
marine life held in captivity and performing at theme park shows. Yes, we're talking about
dolphin robots taking over the (Sea)world!

The San Francisco-based company, which also creates creatures, submersibles, and
effects for Hollywood, subsea, and tech industries, was founded in 1991 by veteran
special effects artist and Academy Award nominee (for The Perfect Storm) Walt Conti.
With plenty of help along the way from Roger Holzberg, the former creative director/vice
president at Walt Disney Imagineering, Edge has created nearly 100 highly specialized,
unique technology-based systems (including helping to design and build James
Cameron’s Deepsea Challenger, which, in record-setting fashion, he piloted to the
deepest place in the ocean). Now Edge has big plans to change the future of aquariums
as we know it, not just with its recent 2.0 version of the aforementioned robo-dolphin, but
with sharks, whales, and more already in development.

“The goal of this initiative is to reimagine the entertainment, educational, and business
potential of the marine animal industry. Real-time animatronics are hyper-real creatures
capable of delivering any experience you can imagine,” Holzberg explains to SYFY
WIRE in an email. “From dolphins sharing their dreams with your children, to great white
sharks inviting you to be a part of their feeding frenzy, to sea dragons breathing fire in a
nighttime fountain show. Safe, up close, personal engagement with the creatures of our
world ocean is finally possible.” 

Like other real-world, future-leaning tech, the seeds for Edge began with Star Trek, when
Conti took on a project at Industrial Light & Magic creating the whales for Star Trek IV. 

“At that time, Leonard Nimoy (who was directing) had fallen in love with the idea of going
back in time to bring humpback whales to the future (where they had become extinct),”
Conti tells SYFY WIRE, also via email. But they couldn’t find existing footage to
repurpose or the means to shoot new footage properly. They were also disappointed with
screen tests of whale models shot dry for wet (on a smoke-filled stage). “They really
were at a stopping point, when ILM art director Nilo Rodis proposed that I come in and
try to create the whales for real. Miniatures that could swim underwater and be
completely convincing. Without his foresight to attempt this 'crazy idea,' they would never
have come to fruition. Luckily through a series of mockups and tests, we were able to
pull this off.”

Soon James Cameron came calling for his Aliens follow-up, 1989’s The Abyss. Back
then, practical effects ruled the day, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone as
masterful as Cameron at mixing in-camera techniques like rear/front projection and
different scale models.

“And The Abyss was a prime example. The film utilized a full spectrum of full-size
underwater sets and mockups as well as a large number of scale models. We were
asked to create 1/4-scale models of the two submersibles Flatbed and Cab. The film
utilized full-size subs, our 1/4-scale underwater R/C models, and 1/8-scale dry for wet
models,” Conti recalls. “Our models were intended for all the [underwater] shots that had
a lot of contact and action (hitting each other, bouncing off the seafloor, etc.), which you
couldn’t do with the full-size subs or the dry for wet models.”
But on a truncated time budget, these things didn’t just have to look good, they had to be
“little hot rods,” too, “because footage was shot at higher speed so that the models
looked more massive when slowed down — but they needed to sustain chase
sequences and so they had to be incredibly fast to pull that off,” Conti says. “So we had
to design custom motors to get that amount of power out of the small thrusters. On top of
that, Jim insisted that the surroundings be lit by the actual models as if they were in the
darkness of the depths. So the models had a ton of onboard lighting — something like 10
kilowatts.”

After making ”the impossible look easy,” as Cameron is quoted as saying on the
company’s website, Conti tells us he founded Edge Innovations in 1991 “to bring cutting
edge robotic technology to filmed effects.”

The company’s first big project was creating “full-size, self-contained, free-swimming”
orca models for Free Willy, the 1993 film about a kid who frees the eponymous killer
whale who’s set to be euthanized by the owners of his aquarium home.

From there, the company worked on dozens of '90s favorites, including creating the
snake (and lighting it on fire) in 1997’s Anaconda. As CGI came into its own, Edge
segued more into theme park work — “including the Amino Avatar figure in Pandora at
Disney’s animal kingdom, and most recently a huge iRex figure for the Jurassic World
ride in Hollywood.”

As far as the dolphin itself, Version 1.0 was Holzberg’s creation and featured at Disney’s
private island, Castaway Cay.

“Version 1.0 of the dolphin, the one featured in the pilot with Disney, was run entirely by
two animators,” Holzberg says of the creature’s evolution. “Version 2.0 of the dolphin, the
one featured in the more recent pilot video [see above], has enough AI to be able to do a
shallow dive, remain appropriately buoyant, return to the surface, lift its blowhole to
simulate taking a breath, and also to be able to realistically complete turns.

"Any up-close animation, though, is the work of human animators taking over the work of
controlling the dolphin’s movements from the AI, similar to piloting a drone. This
experience and talent of these animators makes the performance of the dolphin intimate,
real, and safe,” Holzberg says. “Our real-time animatronic animals can do anything that
their real-life counterparts can do.” 

But there’s still more work to be done. 

"Version 3.0 (in development) will have an 'Exhibit Mode' that will enable it to behave
realistically like a swimming and breathing dolphin, then the controls will override the AI
to enable the dolphin to perform in the educational and entertainment shows on regular
intervals. This version will have a 10-hour battery life and a 10-year life cycle," Holzberg
explains.

The entire experience is meant to create an impression so real as to be indelible.

“The personalized, real-time experience is what differs this from any film or theme park
experience which is fixed and permanent,” Holzberg says. “When a child is less than two
feet from a dolphin and asks their new friend if she's afraid of sharks too, and the dolphin
looks that child in the eyes and slowly nods yes, you have created a memory for life.”
Unfortunately, due to the coronavirus pandemic, Edge has had to push pause on its
major Chinese aquarium project, which made it past a proof-of-concept pilot. Eventually,
Holzberg says the hope is to have several aquariums with robotic animals much bigger
than dolphins, like never-before-seen sharks and whales. They’re also in preliminary
discussions with several other Chinese companies, as well as companies in South
America. 

Edge also had to delay a long pilot program that would have been up and running
already at an as-yet-unannounced major U.S. aquarium. The educational program for
children centers around the (current) dolphin, and was already conceived and approved
by the aquarium board. “[It] will hopefully proceed once aquariums and theme parks
reopen in the U.S.,” Holzberg says. 

Indeed, there’s much to be hopeful for, as Holzberg can see all sorts of promising
developments in the future, including “Jurassic swimmers,” “fantasy creatures that burst
through water curtains and spit fire,” and, perhaps most importantly, “baby creatures for
kids at resorts to play and learn with.”

And just why is that so important?  

As Holzberg reminds us, “In the IMAX movie The Living Sea,  the narrator says, ‘We
cannot hurt what we grow to love.’”