In fall of 2025 RIT Theme Park Enthusiasts started a Haunted House team with the intent of putting on a full walk through haunted house attraction on campus as a complement to the several Imagine RIT projects that are typically developed in the fall and built in the spring of each academic year. Haunted house would work on the opposite schedule where we design in the spring semester and build starting on day 1 of fall semester to give new members immediate hands on practical experience that currently the club does not offer until about halfway through the year when preliminary designs have been made.
Maker Faire
After taking over the project at the beginning of summer 2026, it quickly became apparent that it would be impractical to host a full scale walk through event that fall and given the budget range from the executive board would be effectively impossible. Collectively I as project lead along with e-board decided to focus our efforts for the next few months on developing effects demos to be shown at Rochester Maker Faire. In the short term this accomplishes many of the original goals of the haunted house project in getting new members working on things that interest them as quick as possible, and establishes a "first outing" of our new project team that can be built upon in later semesters and years. Effectively, we crawl today so next year we can walk and in five years when we all come back for Brick City Weekend the next class of TPE members will have built a full scale attraction on the foundation we laid.
Buckles Ghost
This is an implementation of Pepper's Ghost using the animatronic parrot project from the previous year's Imagine RIT exhibit, named Buckles. Using post mortem analysis I did over the summer, a new controller software was written and a pipeline for animating and sound-synchronizing Buckles along with a few lights inside an enclosure to control the relative light level inside and outside the enclosure.
Projection mapped pumpkin
This is a small projection mapping demo consisting of a 3D modelled and printed pumpkin with several animated "carved pumpkin" faces and designs projected onto it. As a team we developed a pipeline using Davinci Fusion and Blender to animate designs, virtually project rectangular media onto the same pumpkin mesh we have printed, and unwrap the UV of the pumpkin exterior to create properly mapped rectangular media that will then be projected back onto the printed pumpkin.
Changing portraits
This is an implementation of the scrim and lightbox changing portrait technique used in Disney's Haunted Mansion attraction. Two frames were sourced from a local thrift shop, then modelled in CAD and a light box built into them to allow a rear flat portrait and front scrim portrait to be shown by changing light inside the frame.
