What is it actually like to be a bat, or an octopus, or the dog sitting next to you? Umwelt is a physical installation I built with my team — Responsive Environments final project, with Pearl and team — that tries to make that question tangible: a rotating cube you can pick up and turn with your own hands, where each face drops you into the sensory world of a different animal.
Each vertical face of the cube projects a distinct Unity-built world. A rotary encoder reads the cube's physical rotation and streams it in real time into both Unity and a TouchDesigner projection-mapping layer, so the physical object and the digital world stay perfectly in sync as you turn it.
WHAT I BUILT
I led the bird scene and the physical computing side of the build:
- Researched and sourced an AudioMoth — a high-sample-rate, open-source acoustic monitoring device. I 3D-printed and weatherproofed a case for it and used it to record my own original birdsong in the field.
- Designed, laser-cut, and assembled the physical turntable and bearing mechanism the cube sits in — prototyped first in cardboard and marbles, then rebuilt in acrylic with metal bearings.
- Built and debugged the Arduino rotary-encoder circuit and its serial connection into Unity, fixing unstable serial data and syncing physical and virtual rotation speed.
- Co-designed and ran user testing — pre/post questionnaires, Likert-scale metrics, and observed playtesting across the four animal scenes.
A YEAR-LONG THREAD
The name comes from biologist Jakob von Uexküll's term Umwelt — the idea that every organism doesn't just live in a different environment, it perceives an entirely different reality, shaped by whatever senses it has. Drawing on Ed Yong's An Immense World, the installation asks visitors to sit with two questions: is the world I imagine as ideal for myself also ideal for another species? And how much does my own perception quietly define what I even assume "the world" is?
This project is the second half of a longer thread for me — it grew directly out of the birdsong ML research I did in Exploring Machine Intelligence. Same underlying question, this time built as something you can walk up to and turn with your hands.
PROCESS
