Former Boston Dynamics Execs Launch Dynamic Creatures to Put AI-Powered Robot Characters in Theme Parks
Two veterans of the famous robotics company want to build Spot and Atlas into entertainment characters that can dance, joke, and one day hug you back.
Key points
- Dynamic Creatures launched in 2025, co-founded by former Boston Dynamics chief strategy officer Marc Theermann and former robotics research leader Farbod Farshidian.
- The company is Boston Dynamics' official entertainment and hospitality partner, building characters on top of Boston Dynamics' Spot and Atlas robot platforms.
- Its AI platform, SnowJay, handles movement and real-time conversation between robots and people.
- First customer deployments are planned for early 2027, starting with a mix of human operators and automated controls.
- Backers include Eniac Ventures, Kindred Ventures, Heliad, and Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert as a strategic angel investor.
If you've ever watched a Boston Dynamics robot do backflips and thought "that belongs in a theme park", two people had the same idea and have now built a company around it.
Dynamic Creatures launched this week, founded by Marc Theermann, the former chief strategy officer at Boston Dynamics, and Farbod Farshidian, who led robotics research at the Robotics and AI Institute. Their pitch is simple: people love watching robots move, so let's make robots actually designed to entertain. The company name is a nod to both Boston Dynamics and Jim Henson's Creature Shop, the studio behind the Muppets.
"Humans love to see robots dancing and love to see robots in these fun environments," Theermann told The Robot Report.
What exactly will these robots do?
Dynamic Creatures is targeting theme parks, casinos, cruise ships, and hotels. Wait, that's four. It has already built two prototype characters: a purple poodle named Danielle and a Tyrolean mountain troll similar to a Yeti. Its first two unnamed partners are coming with existing film and TV characters they want brought to life at their venues.
The robots are built on Boston Dynamics hardware (Spot, the four-legged dog-shaped robot, and Atlas, the humanoid) as well as compatible machines from Unitree, another robotics company. Building its own robot hardware is a longer-term goal.
The brains behind the movement is a platform called SnowJay, the operating layer that tells a robot how to walk smoothly and how to respond to people nearby. Farshidian helped give the Atlas robot a more natural walking style at CES 2026. SnowJay uses motion capture, NVIDIA animation tools, and reinforcement learning (where software improves by trial and error, similar to how a child learns to walk) to produce movement that feels organic. Our piece from 15 August 2026, "Robots Can Move. They Can See. So Why Can't They Hold a Conversation?", found that poor voice interaction could be the single biggest barrier to robots being accepted in public spaces, which makes SnowJay's focus on human-robot conversation the part worth watching most closely here.
"If you look at many robots out there, they're essentially deaf and mute," Theermann said.
When will people actually see these in the wild?
Not immediately. First deployments are planned for early 2027, closely supervised.
In those early pilots, human operators will control the robots while the system learns. Dynamic Creatures has hired puppeteers to figure out which movements make people laugh or feel at ease. Over time, the plan is to move from one operator per robot toward one person monitoring many robots at once.
Safety is a big open question the team takes seriously. Today, humanoid robots in factories stop completely when a person gets too close. That won't work at a theme park. "We want to get to a point where you can hug the robot," Theermann said.
| Detail | Info |
|---|---|
| Company founded | 2025 |
| First deployments | Early 2027 |
| Robot platforms used | Boston Dynamics Spot, Atlas; Unitree robots |
| AI platform | SnowJay |
| Key investors | Eniac Ventures, Kindred Ventures, Heliad, Marc Raibert |
| Target venues | Theme parks, casinos, cruise ships, hotels |
Common questions
Will these robots replace theme park performers?
Not in the early stages. Every robot will have a human operator controlling or monitoring it closely, and the company sees robots and people working together rather than robots replacing staff.
Is there a privacy concern with robots that watch and respond to guests?
The company hasn't published a detailed data policy yet. If you visit a venue using these robots, it's worth asking what data (video, audio, interaction logs) is collected and how long it is kept. That's a fair question for any interactive technology in a public space.
