Luna Park in 3D
Thompson & Dundy’s Luna Park: 3D Printed was an ambitious two year installation at the Coney Island Museum, reimagining the legendary 1903 Luna Park through the lens of emerging digital fabrication. The project began with a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised $16,000 to build a small “bot farm” of desktop 3D printers. Using this custom setup, I reconstructed Luna Park at 1:13 scale—its fantastical towers, onion domes, spires, and electric-era architecture—entirely as 3D-printed sculpture. Over the course of the year, the installation steadily expanded into a dense, glowing miniature city composed of hundreds of models and more than 10,000 hours of print time.
At the heart of the project was my Scan-A-Rama 3D Portrait Studio, an open-source full-body scanning system I designed using Xbox Kinect sensors. Throughout the season, I scanned and printed hundreds of visitors, performers, and Coney Island locals, populating the model city with the living characters who animate the boardwalk today. Blending historical nostalgia with modern maker culture, Luna Park: 3D Printed became both a love letter to Coney Island and a meditation on how spectacle, technology, and public imagination continually reinvent one another.
Why I Built a Time Machine- Luna Park VR & TED Talk
Why I Built a Time Machine grew out of my lifelong fascination with magic—first as a performer in the Coney Island sideshow, then as a designer exploring how interactivity and emerging tools can create wonder. When I discovered the ornate, electric dreamscape of turn-of-the-century Luna Park, I became obsessed with bringing it back to life. I spent years researching, 3D modeling, and ultimately reconstructing the park as both a massive 3D-printed installation and an immersive VR world. I wanted people to experience the same sense of awe that early visitors must have felt walking into that “city of fire,” lit by hundreds of thousands of bulbs at the dawn of the machine age.
The VR reconstruction became my time machine—an experience that lets audiences travel back a century and step inside the fantastical architecture, rides, and optimism that shaped the birth of modern entertainment. As I see it, we stand today where early filmmakers once stood: at the threshold of a new medium that lets us move through time and space in ways that were once impossible. The project is both a celebration of Luna Park’s ingenuity and a call to imagine boldly, using emerging technologies to create new forms of magic, wonder, and play for the 21st century and beyond.