Sustain
INTERACTIVE INSTALLATION / MOVEMENT-DRIVEN DESIGN
Sustain is an interactive installation that turns movement into a living field of light. Built in TouchDesigner, it uses real-time optical-flow tracking to translate a visitor's motion into a responsive particle system. The piece rewards sustained, rhythmic movement: the longer a visitor keeps moving, the more the visuals accumulate and bloom. It's part of my research into how visual and spatial design shapes motivation toward physical activity.
Project Contribution
01
REAL-TIME SYSTEM DESIGN IN TOUCHDESIGNER
02
INTERACTION AND MOTION MAPPING
03
VISUAL AND PARTICLE DESIGN
04
EXHIBITION AND PUBLIC DEPLOYMENT
05
Immersive experience
What is this?
Sustain is an interactive installation designed to create an engaging experience that rewards consistent movement. Built for a festival audience of children, its goal is to make sustained, rhythmic activity feel worthwhile, shifting the reward away from single bursts of effort and toward the value of keeping going.
MORE COMING
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STAY TUNED
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MORE COMING ✳︎ STAY TUNED ✳︎
Interaction
Design Approach
The interaction is built entirely on optical-flow tracking: the system reads the amount and rhythm of movement in real time. This keeps the experience fast, robust, and privacy-friendly: no skeleton tracking, no data stored, so it holds up in a busy and unpredictable public setting.
Built in TouchDesigner, an optical-flow operator feeds a custom accumulator that turns bursts of motion into a value that builds with consistency and decays when it stops. This drives a GPU particle system whose size, color, and intensity respond live, while a feedback loop adds glowing trails and different hues, so sustained rhythm visibly grows the particle field.
Designing for Immersive experiences
Immersion in this project is achieved by filling the visitor's whole field of view with a dark, glowing world that responds only to them. With no interface, no text, and no scoring on screen, there is nothing to read or get right, only movement and its immediate visual echo. The particles react and grow the moment a child moves, pulling attention away from self-consciousness and into play.