The interactive wall in the River Alive! exhibit at the Independence Seaport Museum is a 32-foot long projection of the Delaware River watershed. Using interactive sensors, visitors spin, blow and drum to clean up sections of the river. Once complete, the wall shows what a clean, healthy watershed full of vibrant life.
Using Unity, we created a large-scale multi-player interactive game. The wall features 5 habitats of the watershed, each with 3 levels. Users can level up by interacting with the corresponding sensor positioned in front of that zone. Upon leveling up, user interaction begins to spawn more and more life that is unique to that habitat. As the entire river becomes cleaner, the animals that spawn venture across the entire wall and explore other habitats they might be found in.
The animations featured in this interactive are unique to the creature’s movement. Some "hero" creatures like the otter even feature special randomly triggered animations like swimming in a figure eight, swimming in a circle, or swimming up to the top float on their backs. Keep an eye out and you might even catch the otter giving a friendly wave and wink to the visitors.
Another notable animation is the shader built to clean the water. As users interact, a corresponding animation ripples through the water to indicate progress. Each sensor has a unique water animation.
With a project of this scale, there were many technical challenges to overcome. As the wall is 32-feet long, building such a dynamic application application on a canvas that big caused some issues. Rendering the water shader at such a large scale severely impacted performance. To cope with this, we had a creative solution. The water is actually rendered away from the rest of the scene at a smaller scale. A secondary camera is then pointed at the water, and then this texture is scaled up and drawn in view of the main camera. That solution came from a brief tutorial I came across here.