The Science Behind Pixar

Pixar's films run on math, physics, and code. The Museum of Science, Boston, and Pixar Animation Studios wanted visitors to try that work with their own hands.

The challenge

The Science Behind Pixar walks through the studio's production pipeline in eight sections, with more than 50 interactive elements covering modeling, rigging, surfaces, lighting, animation, and more. Each interactive had to teach exactly one idea about computer animation, clearly enough for someone who just walked up.

There was a technical catch, too. Pixar's character models were built for film rendering, not real-time interaction. And the exhibition would travel as two 13,000-square-foot copies, one touring the U.S. and one touring internationally.

What we built

Working with the museum's exhibit team, we recreated, textured, and rigged the 3D models so they could run in real time, and built interactives in Unity.

Many stations pair a touchscreen with physical controls: knobs and sliders for rigging a face, cranks for animation, fabric you wrap around shapes to change their surface, and a ball controller for moving through 3D space. Arduino microcontrollers read those sensors and pass the data to the software over serial.

For students who couldn't visit, the museum also launched an online version with lesson plans for teachers, and exported some of the interactives to WebGL so they run in a web browser. It's at sciencebehindpixar.org.

The result

The Science Behind Pixar premiered at the Museum of Science in June 2015 and gave the museum its best summer attendance in 17 years. It won the 2016 ASTC Roy L. Shafer Leading Edge Award, drew more than 1.5 million visitors at eight venues in the U.S. and Canada by 2019, and is still on tour in 2026.