September 16, 2013 – It might be hard to appreciate in the 21st century, but before interactive apps, before CGI, and before cinema, a lot of what we’d call “animated entertainment” consisted of little hand-cranked robots. These toys, called automata, were mechanical wonders whose appeal rested on novelty: If you turn the crank, what will this lifeless hunk of wood do? …The software team, led by Stelian Coros and Bernhard Thomaszewski in Disney Research’s Zurich lab, sought to create a way to make the design and fabrication of automata as easy as dorking around with iMovie–or maybe Final Cut Pro.
