Developed for the Design Studio course at ATLAS, Connection Garden is a projection-mapped greenhouse installation that guides two participants through the “Fast Friends” technique, a set of questions designed to build connection between strangers.
Inside the greenhouse, two seats face a “magic book”: a blank book with questions projected onto it from above, with page turns detected by an Intel RealSense camera. Participants read an icebreaker question, answer it, then turn the page to reveal the next one. As the conversation progresses, projected plants on the backdrop grow to mark the developing connection, and both the plant colors and the DMX lighting shift to match each question’s emotional tone. Completing the sequence triggers a celebratory animation across the space before resetting for the next pair.
Tech Overview
Built in TouchDesigner. The greenhouse itself was retrofitted with frosted rear-projection screens, one mapped to the back panel for the main plant animation, and a second top-down projection onto the book.
- Plant animation: simple procedural plants generated in TouchDesigner’s POPS, composed into a triptych. That output feeds into StreamDiffusion, which uses Stable Diffusion to turn the rough procedural shapes into fully rendered, evolving plant animations in real time, each new question advances the growth and pushes a new pass through StreamDiffusion.
- Magic book: an inline Python script reads depth data from the RealSense camera, finds the center of mass of depth values over the book’s surface, and tracks the velocity of that point to determine turn direction.
- Question/color database: each page turn advances through a database of questions paired with color schemes. Color data feeds both the POPS plant generator and a DMX interface driving 4 RGB stage lights that wash the outside of the greenhouse to match.
