A Peek Inside an Animatronic Display Workshop

Robotics Workshop

If you’ve ever walked along Fifth Avenue in Manhattan during the holiday season, no doubt you’ve seen the incredible animatronic store displays in the windows of stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman. In this excellent video, Cool Hunting interviews Lou Nasti, the animatronic mastermind behind many of these displays. Lou is the owner of Mechanical Displays in Brooklyn and has been creating display robotics professionally for 30 years. While it’s clear that Christmas is serious business for Lou, he also shows off some of his non-Christmas creations, such as a pair of cycling skeletons for halloween. According to Lou, the NYPD asked the store owners to take that display down because it was causing accidents on the street. To see more of Lou’s fantastic work, check out his company’s website.

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Matt Richardson is a San Francisco-based creative technologist and Contributing Editor at MAKE. He’s the co-author of Getting Started with Raspberry Pi and the author of Getting Started with BeagleBone.

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