Dynamic Creatures Is Building AI-Powered Character Robots for Theme Parks and Hotels

Dynamic Creatures emerged from stealth on September 8, 2026 with a specific idea for physical AI: build mobile robotic characters that can move through real guest environments and interact with the person in front of them.

The Boston-based company is targeting entertainment and hospitality. Its first markets include theme parks, hotels and resorts, museums, cultural institutions, cruise ships and live venues.

Dynamic Creatures says it is already working with a large theme park and a retailer on guest-facing character experiences. The company has not named those customers, but the launch makes its direction clear. It wants advanced robotics to become part of the experience itself: a moving character that can notice what is happening around it and respond in real time.

The hardware relationship is a major part of the launch.

Boston Dynamics confirms Dynamic Creatures as its official entertainment and hospitality partner. Dynamic Creatures can build character experiences on Boston Dynamics systems, while also creating fully custom robots for a specific brand, story or environment.

That gives the company two paths. A project can begin with an existing advanced robotics platform and add character design, behavior and interaction, or it can start with a custom machine built around the creative brief.

Dynamic Creatures was also founded by people with direct experience inside the robotics ecosystem. CEO Marc Theermann previously served as Chief Strategy Officer at Boston Dynamics and held senior roles at Google. CTO Farbod Farshidian previously led robotics research at the Robotics and AI Institute and worked on learning-based control for highly dynamic robots.

The software platform is called SnowJay.

Dynamic Creatures describes SnowJay as an integrated robotics AI platform and the operating system at the heart of its characters. Its job is to coordinate movement, perception and behavior so the robot can operate as one connected physical system.

The platform combines real-time control with behavior orchestration, perception, character programming and the systems needed to turn those capabilities into a guest-facing experience.

That integration matters because an interactive character has to do several things at once. It needs to move through a space, observe the people and activity around it, select the right behavior, keep the motion fluid and deliver the response as part of the character.

SnowJay includes a real-time robot-control layer for executing behaviors and transitioning between skills.

Dynamic Creatures says the onboard platform includes policy and controller inference, behavior orchestration, skill execution, logging, monitoring and diagnostics. It also manages defined operating states such as controlled stopping and shutdown.

The interesting part is how those pieces connect. A character can perceive a person or event, choose an appropriate behavior, execute the movement and continue adapting as the interaction changes.

That turns the robot into a live system rather than a sequence of isolated AI features. Perception is connected to behavior. Behavior is connected to motion. Motion is connected back to the physical environment.

Dynamic Creatures is also building SnowJay around human-robot interaction.

The company says its HRI layer brings together multimodal perception, conversation, memory, task orchestration, robot movement, animatronics, facial expressions, gaze, gestures, voice and human-facing interfaces.

It describes this as a character-focused form of vision-language-action interaction: human input is interpreted by the system and translated into physical output that can include movement, expression and gesture.

That is a useful way to understand the product. The AI is designed to connect language, perception and physical behavior inside the same character experience.

SnowJay also includes a learning and training pipeline for new robot behaviors.

Dynamic Creatures says teams can develop skills such as natural locomotion, expressive gestures and recovery behaviors, with training inputs that can come from motion capture or animation.

The platform also supports workflows where animations created in tools such as Maya can be brought into SnowJay. That connects a familiar character-animation process with a physical robot-control stack.

For entertainment teams, that creates an interesting bridge between creative direction and robotics engineering. A movement can begin as a designed performance, then become part of a robot behavior that SnowJay can coordinate with perception and interaction.

Theme parks and hospitality venues are a natural fit for the launch because interaction is already part of the experience.

Dynamic Creatures says its initial market includes theme parks, location-based entertainment, hotels, resorts, museums, cultural institutions, cruise ships and live venues. Future applications may also include luxury retail and automotive brand-experience centers.

The company says characters built on existing robotics platforms can be deployed in months, and it is offering leasing models for platform-based characters. That gives operators a route to introduce a robotic character without starting every project as a completely custom hardware program.

Dynamic Creatures is packaging mobility, AI, character design and interaction into one deployment model for venues that want a physical character people can encounter in the real world.

Dynamic Creatures is a good example of where physical AI is heading next.

The robot is becoming more than a machine that moves. The software stack is starting to coordinate perception, language, memory, behavior, expression and motion around one live interaction.

SnowJay gives that idea a concrete architecture. Control runs on the robot. Skills can be trained and orchestrated. Human input can flow into an HRI layer. Character design shapes the final response. Boston Dynamics provides a proven robotics connection, while Dynamic Creatures builds the experience layer around it.

For theme parks, hotels and other guest-facing spaces, that could create a new kind of encounter: a character that can move through the same environment as the visitor, notice the moment and respond as part of the experience.

That is the upgrade here. Physical AI is starting to feel less like a demo and more like a character you can actually meet.