Spin the wheel, peek through the slits, and watch a short 3D animation come to life. Swap individual frames in and out to try new motions without rebuilding the whole toy.
Most zoetropes are fixed — one animation, one wheel, built once. I wanted to know whether a zoetrope could work like a toy system: modular, rebuildable, and easy to iterate on. LEGO bricks were a natural fit for that kind of hands-on prototyping.
With an undergraduate collaborator, I built a small modular zoetrope from LEGO:
The key insight was modularity: instead of fabricating an entire new zoetrope for every animation, we could swap scenes frame-by-frame and reuse the same mechanical platform.
Photos coming soon. I'm adding build photos from this project to the site — the modular LEGO frame, printed animation figures, and the wheel in motion.
This project planted the seed for everything that followed in my PhD. The idea that scene boxes should be swappable — first with LEGO clips, later with magnets on a bike wheel — became the core design principle of my Interactive Modular Zoetrope.