My rebuild of the atokirina', the glowing seeds from James Cameron's Avatar. Turn on the camera and the woodsprites drift in, find you, and come to rest on you, carried by the music. It started in 2024 as a hundred glowing dots in Processing; the 2026 rebuild is a live browser experience, with the design and the code both mine.
I’ve been a huge fan of James Cameron’s work, especially Avatar. The way he came up with it always stuck with me. He saw the bioluminescent forest in a dream, started writing it in the early 90s, and then waited until 2009 for the technology to catch up to what he’d seen. That resonated with me, because I also get ideas in my dreams and then try to build them in the real world. A lot of my ideas come to me that way. And when I look at what he made, the craft and the effort behind it, it really is a masterpiece.
Step into the encounterBest on a laptop, camera on, sound up. It runs about two minutes.
In 2024 I built a very basic version of this for an interactive media course, in Java Processing. The woodsprites were just little glowing circles back then. They moved and glowed to the music: play any track, or honestly just scream at it, and the volume and the frequency drove both the glow and the movement. The louder and busier the sound got, the brighter they burned and the more they stirred. It was basic, and the scene itself stayed still, but the idea was already there.
Recently I started building on top of that, one idea after another. I could see the potential in it, so I kept going. What I really wanted was to stop watching it on a flat image and actually experience it, the way those immersive shows at Vivid Sydney feel. In the film, Jake Sully waits and the woodsprites drift over to him, settle on him, and lift off again once they’re done. When he waves them away, they scatter. I wanted to feel that for myself.
I started small, with the woodsprite itself. In the film they’re called the atokirina’. I honestly lost count of how many times I redesigned it. Here are the versions I went through, and how each one moved, along with some of the references I was working from.
53 versions
drag through the story
It took me almost 53 versions to get close to what you see in the movie Avatar. The movement, the physics, the glow. Let me walk you through them.
Then came the movement, making them feel alive. This is where it gets a bit technical. I also gave them a sense of spatial depth, so they feel like they’re actually in the room with you, closer to a VR or AR feeling than something on a screen.
There’s a moment in the film where Jake tries to shoo them away with his hand. I wanted people to get to do that too, as if these are living entities in your space and you can just wave them off. So when you wave at them they move away, and the way they react changes with speed. When they’re fleeing, the tentacles move fast. When they’re drifting toward you, slow. It’s that relationship between how fast they move and how the tentacles behave.
The next part was tracking, picking up the outline of a person in the camera so the woodsprites could come and land on them. A lot of the fixes I made around perching live here, getting them to actually sit on your body properly.
I also wanted to show what’s happening underneath. When the camera is reading you, there’s a skeleton and a set of markers, the blueprint of how your body is being recognized and how a woodsprite first finds its spot on you. I wanted people to actually see that, not just take my word for it.
This is nowhere near what the talented 3D artists out there have done, and I want to say that plainly. It’s a solo thing I built in the browser, doing both the design and the code, as my own way of getting close to a scene I love.
The film and its Tree of Souls scene. James Horner’s score. MediaPipe for the pose and segmentation models. Processing, where the 2024 original was built. And the reference images I worked from.