Phoenix Media Wall Sample
july - oct 2023
Sample project and documentation for use by artists commissioned by Phoenix Leicester to create work for their interactive media wall.
About
As part of it’s large refurbishment opened in 2023, Phoenix Cinema and Arts Centre had a new interactive media wall installed in the café area. It consists of a 4k display with both a regular webcam and a Zed 2 body tracking camera. To prepare for a series of commissions for the wall related to future exhibitions, I was tasked with creating a basic sample project and documentation that the artists could use to create their works without advanced technical knowledge.I created a blank template project, as well as a simple Three.js project using physics and webcam input. The sample project contains a grid of physics-enabled cubes with the webcam texture divided across them in a box. The camera orbits around the cubes, revealing the full webcam texture on the inside of the cube (behind where the camera starts). The cubes are knocked down and reset when the camera is in a certain position, creating a seamless loop.
For the first exhibition launched with a corresponding media wall artwork, the artist decided to use a custom Unity template. This was an unintended use case for the wall but I worked together with the artist and the suppliers of the hardware to figure out a solution to display the work.
There was also a Unity WebGL template created by Anthony Woodward of Twin Planets, link below.
Links
Live webapp: media-wall-webcam-sample.vercel.appGithub repository: github.com/adamstephensun/media-wall-webcam-sample
Twin Planets: twinplanets.co.uk