Disney unveiling its Disney Infinity 'gaming initiative' next month

Disney Infinity, rumored to be the theme-park-running, movie-making, game developer's take on Skylanders, will be unveiled next month during an event in Hollywood featuring the chief creative officer of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios.

According to an invitation sent to Polygon, the Jan. 15 Disney Infinity event will feature John Lasseter, chief creative officer of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios and a principal creative advisor at Walt Disney Imagineering, as well as John Pleasants, co-president of Disney Interactive.

While the invitation doesn't detail what exactly Disney Infinity is, Disney fansite Stitch Kingdom reported last month that the project was initially codenamed Toy Box.

Disney Infinity is an ambitious project from the studio which will use collectible toys with embedded NFC/RFID chips to interact with console games, according to that report. The game, which sounds similar to Activision's Skylanders, will be bolstered by Disney and Pixar's characters and run on several platforms including console, mobile and computer.

In an article about an interview with Pleasants in October, the New York Times described Toy Box as a "console game with extensive mobile and online applications in which various Pixar and Disney characters will interact with one another for the first time."