Created for Together House and Techno Festival, and later deployed at Play! NYC game convention, this piece is a narrative diorama centered on a lone scavenger who’s built an audiovisual oasis, a place to recharge and regain creative headspace amid a chaotic cyberpunk dystopia.
Big speakers and synced visual effects bump to a live DJ. Festival-goers can disrupt physical objects in the scene, trigger high-energy visual effects, and see their own likeness rendered as a hologram emanating from one of the Scavenger’s gadgets. A bank of TVs doubles as a virtual art gallery, letting users flip through channels of surreal, beat-synced animations from collaborating artists.
Tech Overview
Built in Unity 3D, with environments and the Scavenger character modeled and animated in Blender.
A Kinect tracks participants and mirrors their hands in 3D space within the diorama, letting them physically interact with objects in the scene. A separate TouchDesigner script analyzes incoming audio from the venue’s mixer in real time, using frequency data to drive particle effects synced to the music. The Scavenger character himself stays easygoing throughout, responding to changes in the environment via a dynamic IK rig.
