Avatar - SigEp Booth 2023
This was our take on an Avatar themed booth for CMU's annual spring carnival! In order of walkthrough our booth featured the following rooms.
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The Lab
We aimed to replicate the scenes from the human base of operation on Pandora. This room features illustrations of the mechs used by the humans, scientific tools and screens, as well as a hyper-realistic life sized replica of an Avatar in its chamber.
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The Day Jungle
In this room we explore the vast beauty of Pandora's flora and fauna during the daytime. Colorful paper mache foliage, life sized murals of the Na'vi, and a 3D printed model of Pandora's viper-wolf bring this room to life.
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The Sky Room
With this room we attempt to capture the scene where Jake and a group of young Na'vi climb the vines and floating mountains to tame a Banshee, a right of passage for joining the Na'vi as one of their people. The room features a robotic flying island driven by fishing lines, as well as a functioning waterfall spilling out of a giant island.
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The Banshee's Nest
After scaling the vines to the banshee's nest, visitors of our booth step out onto a balcony revealing a massive paper mache/3D printed replica of Toruk (a giant winged beast). In the first movie, Jake (the main character) tames this beast, claiming the title of Toruk Makto and becoming the leader of his people.
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The Night Jungle
In this room we show the beauty of Pandora's flora and fauna during the night time. Using fluorescent paints, LEDs nested in plants, and UV lighting, we bring our guests through an extraterrestrial experience full of exotic and glowing plants. Like the sky room, we use fishing lines to drive small "Wood sprites" up and down adding to the immersion of this room.
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The Way of the Water
Here we show the coastal environment of Pandora featured in the second Avatar movie. The room contains a pool and a sandy walkway to submerge our audience into their environment. Featured also is a tapestry mural depicting the sea-side settlements and paper mache roots extending from the mural into the sea like mangroves.
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Exterior
Our booth's exterior is decorated with 3 main facades. The left side represents the humans and their high-tech settlement. The center and roof are built out of wood and carved foam to give the appearance of the Tree of Life, the main Na'vi settlement in the movie. The right side features the exit stairs and an array of alien plants overgrowing from our booth's interior.
I chaired the sky room with the goal of reproducing the awesome scenery shown in the scene where Jake and the Na'vi climb the floating mountains and vines to the Banshee's nest.
Halleluiah Mountains - Pinterest
`Walking to the Sky" - Avatar: The Way of the Water
The three main features I wanted to capture were
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The size and scale of the floating mountains
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The motion of the floating mountains
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The waterfalls dropping from the bottom of the islands
And what better way is there to build a room that pops to life than ROBOTS!
Below are images of the planned layout of our room. It contains a staircase wrapping around the left side with a large center gap for decorative features. A massive 8ft tall paper mache island was constructed in the opposite corner in order to house/disguise the functional pieces of the waterfall. Close and above the stairs are small paper mache islands and a miniature banshee are suspended by fishing line to give the illusion of scale in the room.
A 3-axis cable drive box is housed at the base of the room, driving three individual fishing lines connected to another island to give it full range of motion around the room. Vines are also added as décor and to disguise the green garden hose routing water up into the waterfall.
Visual Concept Art
Labelled CAD image for room components
My favorite part of the room was working on the string driven floating island. We used a python script running on a Rpi4 to handle teleop commands through SSH as well as generating helical trajectories and motor commands sent through serial. An STM32F4 was used to handle the direct control of each motor. We used an STM microchip instead of Arduino or Rpi to handle the required 6 encoder pins from the motors. Onboard the STM32, we ran an internal PID loop with positional commands read through serial from the Rpi. Below is our first successful test outside of the booth, and the final result running during carnival.
First Successful Test
Integrated Into the Booth!
The waterfall was built using a 3D printed spillway and a high powered sump pump. We designed leak-proof mating features between the spillway adapter and outlet, allowing us to test and tweak our outlet design to a suitable waterfall shape without letting water destroy our paper mache crafts below. The collection pool was covered with a layer of chicken wire and waterproof polyfill foam to give the illusion that the water was falling down through the clouds. In the room, the waterfall was disguised inside of the large island with vines masking the hose.
First Successful Test!
Disguised Waterfall
The large island was made entirely out of wood framing, chicken wire, and paper mache. In fact it was so darn big that we had to install it through the roof with a scissor lift and prayers.
