With over 106 patents ranging from the world’s most realistic lightsaber to the groundbreaking HoloTile floor, Lanny Smoot is one of the most creative inventors of our time. He is the first Disney Imagineer to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, for which a ceremony will be held in May of this year. He’s also only the second person from The Walt Disney Company to receive this honor, apart from Walt Disney himself.
“Being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame is a dream come true,” Smoot said. “For an inventor, this is the best thing you can do.”
Smoot has been tinkering with technology for as long as he can remember. He entered every science fair, dismantled things to create unique inventions, and was always driven by his curiosity to create. He described one of his earliest memories of when he was around five years old, and his father brought home an electric bell, some wires, a lightbulb, and a battery.
“I’m sitting there at the table, and he puts them together, and he gets the bell ringing. This was like magic. Then he gets the light lit. I say this is poetic, but it’s true. It lit the rest of my career. I was locked into science, mostly electricity,” said Smoot. “And it never left me: that urge to create new things, doing them myself, being able to see it purely for curiosity’s sake.”
Smoot began his career at Bell Labs in 1978, where he worked for 20 years before being approached by Disney representatives interested in his invention of the “Electronic Panning Camera.” The camera allows an unlimited number of people to control which camera angles they want to see of a remotely televised site. He would become Disney’s most prolific inventor, constantly developing something new.
One of Smoot’s current projects is the HoloTile floor, which he describes as “… the world’s first omnidirectional treadmill floor. Every part of the floor can move anything or anybody that’s on it. It can counter your walking movement, so you could walk on it forever.”
While still in the prototype phase, the HoloTile floor promises many possible uses for theme park attractions and beyond, including creating a completely immersive virtual reality (VR) experience. It’s not just limited to one person; two people can walk across the HoloTile floor without bumping into each other. Another fascinating aspect is the ability to move an object on the HoloTile floor by extending your arm, making your dreams of using the Force come to life.
“I think the HoloTile floor solves many of the problems that virtual reality has been looking at for years because it was always possible to insert you into an environment, but when you hit your bed as you’re walking around in your room in VR glasses, you realize, ‘Hmm. There’s something wrong here,'” Smoot said.
Smoot’s inspiration for the HoloTile floor came not from a project for a Disney attraction, but instead from his lifetime of being an avid Star Trek fan. He wondered if it could be possible to create a “Holodeck”, which appears in the TV show as a room where you can be immersed in an environment through realistic holograms.
“I knew about the thing called the ‘Holodeck,’ which is where people can walk around forever in a room that’s 24 feet by 24 feet. They’re going off to distant mountains and streams. How can that possibly be, right?” Smoot said. “It must be that the floor of the ‘Holodeck’ has the ability to move people in any direction, to allow them to walk in any direction, to prevent them from bumping into things like the walls of the room or each other. It made me think. How do you have a moving surface that allows you to walk on it forever in any direction? […] That was the spark.”
As for his love for another sci-fi universe, Smoot made his mark by inventing a realistic, fully retractable lightsaber from Star Wars. It debuted at the now-closed Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel at Disney World.
“It is the most realistic lightsaber ever made, and it extends, retracts, is super bright, and exactly mirrors what you see in the movies,” said Smoot. Currently, the mechanism that makes the lightsaber extend and retract needs to be handled with care, as it can flop over due to its lightweight nature. But with all the innovations happening in the tech world (and in Lanny Smoot’s workshop), the possibility of having the lightsaber battles of our wildest dreams is not far away.
Some of Smoot’s other inventions can be found around the Disney Parks, on rides like the Haunted Mansion. Madame Leota’s floating head in the seance room is an excellent example of an engineering and illusion feat done by Smoot. He also reworked the effects of the stretching portraits in the front entry hall to be more compact and realistic. Smoot says he has no current plans to retire and will continue to bring his ideas to life as long as he is enjoying himself.
Smoot firmly believes that everyone on Earth has an extraordinary talent in something. As for advice to future generations, he hopes that they never lose that spark of child-like curiosity.
“I was curious about all things in life, all things science,” Smoot explained. “I wanted to learn more about those things. I also wanted to do things with what I learned. So we have to stay curious. And all of us, we are curiosity driven. That’s the key to success. Imagination is the solution to curiosity.”
