Our work / Science museum
Discovery Cube Los Angeles: Interactive Tornado
A full-height, visitor-controlled tornado exhibit, designed, fabricated and installed by Mad Systems.
- Mad’s contribution
- Exhibit design and stainless-steel fabrication
- Mad’s contribution
- Airflow and fog integration
- Mad’s contribution
- Touchscreen controls and installation
A phenomenon visitors can change.
The brief called for a tornado approximately seven feet in diameter and twenty feet high. Mad designed, manufactured and installed the stainless-steel exhibit, including a touchscreen interface for visitors to change its behavior.
The controls adjust the overhead low-pressure area, the shear winds that create rotation and the color of the lighting. The exhibit makes an invisible process tangible through a moving column of water-based fog.
The mechanism belongs to the experience.
Rather than place the equipment in a raised platform beneath the tornado, Mad incorporated it into a pit. That allowed the tornado’s base to meet a flat floor instead of requiring a ramp to a raised exhibit.
The work combined physical fabrication, airflow, control software and installation.
Design. Engineer. Deliver.
What should your visitors experience?
Bring Mad your brief, an exhibit idea or an operating challenge. We can connect the experience with the audiovisual systems, software and physical details needed to realize it.