Four USU students awarded third place in Disney contest
The Oneiro, a futuristic space cruise ship, is being planned as a luxury space-travel experience in the year 3011. Designed by USU students, the design concept received third place in Disney Imagineering’s ImagiNations Design Competition.
The team, consisting of Philip Le Goubin, Jason Cooper and Adam Dambrink, competed against more than 100 other teams from universities across the U.S. to build an attraction for Disney.
As finalists, the team members received a cash prize as well as the opportunity to interview and network with the Imagineering department at Disney.
Cooper, a USU alumni with a bachelor’s in landscape architecture and environmental planning, said the 2012 competition was different this year, because there was a prompt to design a Disney experience in the year 3011 on the Moon.
Dambrink, who also a graduated with a bachelor’s in landscape architecture and environmental planning, said, “Jason and I did the project last year, and we wanted to do it again, so throughout this past summer we were brainstorming for what the project could be. We wanted something innovative and really different and new. We actually wanted to do a space hotel that orbited the Earth. We were on the right track, but then we adapted it to be more advanced.”
Team members each agreed that there were many possibilities for ideas, and they decided to adapt an idea to design a cruse line based on “fringe” technologies that exist nowadays.
For example, the Oneiro uses a solar sail as propulsion through the solar system, and, Le Goubin, a second-year student majoring in mechanical engineering, said it’s is a space cruse ship that features a series of concentric rings so one can change the amount of gravity in each ring.
“(One of the rings) has an infinity pool,” Cooper said. “You can swim for as long as you want.”
The ship also features variable gravity rooms in which a passenger can change his or her preference of gravity from Earth gravity to weightlessness, Cooper said. From ring to ring, the passengers are given many experiences similar to Disney’s present-day cruises.
“One of the judges asked, ‘Have you ever been on a Disney Cruise ship before?’ And we all said, ‘No,'” Le Goubin said. “He said, ‘Well, you got very close.’ So the fact that one of the execs came around and said we hit the nail was very gratifying.”
From about 130 applicants, the team was selected to be one of six finalists. Being selected as finalists, a Disney press release stated, the team went to Glendale, Calif., for a week, to present its project to a judging panel, interview for internships and go to Disneyland on a backstage tour of the park from the viewpoint of an Imagineer.
“It was awesome,” Dambrink said. “Going down to Glendale and seeing all the things that they’ve done and accomplished, it really opens your eyes and think a lot bigger.”
Le Goubin said the presentation to the Imagineering judging panel was one experience that stood out.
“You get a small pitch,” Le Goubin said. “I felt like throwing up until I got up on the stage, and then I felt fine.”
Among the six teams, USU placed third, Carnegie Mellon University won second with “Create the Night Finale,” and North Carolina State won first place with its design, called “The Mind of Molly Mouse.”
“They put a smile on people’s faces, and they tell a story, and for us to tell a story and put a smile on their face was amazing,” Cooper said. “But the biggest prize, to me, was the opportunity to network with real Imagineers and the possiblity of an internship.”
In the future, the USU team members said they’d like to continue as friends to work with Disney in the Imagineering department.
“I am actually in the process of writing a book,” Dambrink said. “I know I’ll have another degree. I see myself somewhere in America, but it’s funny because before (the project), I would have said ‘I will be living here, doing this.’ But now the possibilities are endless.”
–alexander.h.van_oene@aggiemail.usu.edu