InteractiveInstallation

1 / What it had to do

One night, in the library, during the Break Opera party.
Not a gallery: the room was nearly black, people arrived
already in motion, nobody was going to read an instruction,
and if it stopped working mid-evening there was nobody
standing next to it to restart it. It was also the first thing
I had built that had to exist in a room rather than on my own
screen, which is a different problem from making it
work at a desk.

2 / The idea

Let the constraint pick the hardware. A normal camera is useless
in a room that dark, so the input became a security night
camera, which is built for exactly that. Hand tracking off that feed
is enough to drive a point cloud, and keeping the visual
simple meant there was less to go wrong in front of people
who had not come to look at an installation.

3 / How it works

Security night camera into OBS, OBS into TouchDesigner.
Hand tracking from that feed drives a simple point cloud
with Metaball. The whole chain is short on purpose —
every extra stage is another thing to debug in the dark
during an electronic music night. Making it hold up in that
room, with that light and that crowd, was the hard part.
It held.

4 / What happened

Ran for one night in the library at Tempio,
during Break Opera.