Unbounded

Unbounded's installation room features a three-walled projection system that are used as monitors for the computer running the exhibit's software. A Kinect motion capture sensor is located on the ceiling towards the back of the room, aimed down at the floor area where viewers would enter the space. This sensor outputs a live feed into a TouchDesigner system, which cleans up and filters the incoming data to remove noise and create more distinguished silhouettes. The filtered live feed is then sent to a Unity project, which reads it as a heatmap to identify what areas of the room are occupied.

 

The Unity project contains an environment with handpicked and meticulously placed assets. These assets are a variety of objects (flowers, trees, animals) that have been cut out from their original source material, and digitally edited with a Posterization effect to extract their primary colors. Most assets have been scripted in Unity with specific animation parameters that will make them rotate, grow and shrink, and change color over time. Assets are then placed in the virtual environment at specific positions to create the scene. All assets are also given a real-world coordinate that corresponds to a specific point in the physical installation room.

 

On every frame, each asset will calculate its relevancy value by comparing the live feed heatmap to its real-world coordinate. For example, if an asset's coordinate is placed at the top right corner of the room, its relevancy value will increase when someone walks to that corner. Every asset is then sorted by its relevancy value, and only assets whose values are above a certain threshold will be shown on the display. This is the primary system that allows different objects to pop in and out as people move around the room.

 

Every location also is categorized into a specific zone that contains a skybox. The skybox is the image that wraps around the entire scene behind all of the assets (literally the "sky"). Unbounded has five different skyboxes that correspond to different environment archetypes: Snow, Forest, Canyon, River, and Beach. Each zone also has several "events," such as daytime, rainfall, night, etc. These events are on a cycle that will move to the next semi-randomly chosen event after about 2-4 minutes. Every zone also has a library of melodies and sound effects that play in a random sequence.

 

All of these elements combine to create a dynamic visual-audio display that changes with the time and spatial location of people in the room, resulting in an immersive and interactive experience for the viewer.