Emergence
An Interactive Installation Exploring Urban GrowthTechnical Notes:
Hardware: Kinect Azure, Projector, Laser-cut cardboard topography
Software: TouchDesigner, MediaPipe hand tracking, GLSL shaders, Blender
Techniques: Depth sensing, point cloud processing, projection mapping, real-time generative systems, edge detection, noise-based growth algorithms
Software: TouchDesigner, MediaPipe hand tracking, GLSL shaders, Blender
Techniques: Depth sensing, point cloud processing, projection mapping, real-time generative systems, edge detection, noise-based growth algorithms
How does a city grow?
Cities and forests both expand organically. Branching, adapting, responding to terrain. But we usually design urban spaces with rigid grids, ignoring the topography, water, and natural systems that shaped human settlement for millennia.
What if we could visualize this relationship differently? What if we could literally draw a city into existence and watch it grow across hills and valleys, revealing how organic urban development might coexist more harmoniously with nature?
Emergence is an interactive installation that explores these questions through projection mapping, hand tracking, and real-time generative visuals. Participants move their hands above a physical topography model, drawing paths that trigger organic city growth. Rectilinear grids that adapt to elevation, flowing around peaks and settling in valleys. The city regenerates every 30 seconds, inviting endless experimentation with how urban forms might emerge from natural landscapes.
-------------------------------------------------
Our driving questions:
- Should cities follow rigid grids, or can organic development create more livable spaces?
- How do natural elements like rivers, forests, and elevation shape urban emergence?
- Can we create an experience that makes these invisible forces visible and playable?
The Process
I decided to build an interactive Unity environment that generates virtual landscapes from real biodiversity data. Here's how it works:
The system fetches recent sightings from the citizen science database: a robin in someone's garden, mushrooms in a park, butterflies near a canal.
Each observation shapes the landscape. GPS coordinates become 3D positions. Species density affects color saturation and visual richness. Networks connect nearby sightings, revealing spatial patterns. Vegetation spawns based on landuse data—forests, parks, residential gardens.
You navigate an open world (any location) and discover. Walking through the virtual terrain, you encounter observation markers. Get close and they reveal the actual uploaded photo, species name, date, and the observer who documented it. The experience bridges digital exploration and real community knowledge.
Areas of high biodiversity glow with saturated colors. Zones with few observations appear grey and muted—creating visceral contrast between ecological vitality and absence.
The landscape updates with new observations, creating an evolving ecological portrait of urban space.
This project sits at the intersection of UX/UI design, creative technology, and environmental awareness. It demonstrates how thoughtful interaction design can transform abstract data into meaningful experience—fostering curiosity, connection, and new perspectives.
The work doesn't solve biodiversity loss. It creates experiences that help us notice what's already there, inviting us to see cities not as human-designed infrastructure, but as living communities where design choices shape multispecies futures.
In entertainment, education, urban planning, or conservation contexts, this approach to data-driven world-building offers new possibilities for engagement and awareness.
----------------------------------------
more projects