Digital Kitchen collaborated with architects at Gensler to create a reactive audio-visual sculpture in the lobbies of two of Microsoft's newly renovated buildings on their main campus.
The experience inhabits the interior of a giant, glowing cube suspended in the lobby. A stairway winds through the cube, and as people climb the stairs a unique, L-shaped display shows one of four nature-inspired scenes: water, forest, birds, or clouds. The scenes are generative particle systems, each with its own physics, behavior, and aesthetic.
Kinect cameras track the user's position and trigger events: gusts of wind, water currents, flock disturbances. Atmospheric, generative audio accompanies the visuals, and follows the user to create an immersive 3D soundscape.
We also created a virtual reality mockup of the space to see how the experience would look before it was built.
My role: concepting, visual programming, Kinect tracking system, audio sync protocol, Oculus Rift prototype
Made with: Unity, C#, DirectX 11 Compute Shaders, HLSL, OSC, Kinect, Max