Disclaimer: I was part of the freelance people working for GROSSE8 on this one.
Showcase
Check out GROSSE8s documentation of the project for more videos and details. (I was not part of the on location team, therefore I don’t have any final images/videos I own the rights to)
Description
Schwalbe produces tires and tubes for a lot of vehicles, but they are mainly known for bicycles. As I’ve personally been on a bike since I can think, this was a very cool client for me. I’ve been involved with the programming & software assembly of the headquarter showroom exhibits, involving writing .json scripts and building TouchDesigner patches. The main interaction element of this project is the wheel. It comes in many different shapes and sizes and we always focused on keeping the interaction dynamic. To achieve that, we used dials that can be tweaked by software, to have e.g. clicking resistance in a specific ratio per rotation. The whole showroom has 6 main areas, more than 17 stations & over 35 screens with various aspect ratios & resolutions.
Learnings
Micha from Neoanalog is a really crazy dude. He didn’t have that much experience in TouchDesigner (when the project started) so every problem he encountered, was solved with Python. For me knowing a lot about TouchDesigner, but not that much about Python at the time, it was mind blowing. We basically wrote code comparable to HTML and CSS, with the goal of assembling the TouchDesigner patch on the fly. It was a nice way of working, as it scaled really well. Knowing how much control you have using TouchDesigner, it was amazing to see how much more control one can have when customizing components and building a whole infrastructure from scratch. One problem I could see is, that taking all the control away from the TouchDesigner artists and giving it to the programmers could lead to bottlenecks in production. Every person involved needs to have an understanding of writing and debugging code. In our case, that turned out fine, as everybody felt comfortable with the challenge.
Nice Detail
A personal favourite of mine was, that Schwalbe had some environmentally impactful requests. The showroom should turn itself off, once nobody is using it. It should also track if people approach it and turn itself on when needed, only enabling the rooms that are (or will soon be) visited. As 24/7 exhibitions tend to run… well 24/7 they consume a lot of electricity. Such small details can mitigate the power consumption.