10/19/2020 - 1/30/2021
Meow Wolf Las Vegas
TouchDesigner, GeoPix, Python, GLSL, Floppy Flex LED
Meow Wolf’s second permanent installation, Omega Mart, is an interactive, mind-bending art experience. Participants explore an extraordinary supermarket that bursts into surreal worlds and unexpected landscapes.
AREA15, which houses the Omega Mart attraction is a new development project located a short distance from the Las Vegas Strip. It’s a wholly re-imagined world weaving together immersive experiences, themed events, art installations, restaurants, bars, and nightlife.
Working with international and local artists, AREA15 has created a one-of-a-kind entertainment and retail experience.
The Factory is one of the larger themed areas within the the Omega Mart experience, and my original connection to the project. The Factory is an explorable space with a very metal & industrial feel, with an led product called Floppy Flex outlining much of the architectural outlines and highlights of the space. The idea narratively speaking was that The Factory is where "The Source" is produced. The glowing liquid flows through pipes going every which way (that's the Floppy Flex), creating a very fluid, dynamic, and beautifully eerie aesthetic with the accompanying soundtrack.
To pull this off, Meow Wolf decided to adopt GeoPix into the content pipeline. Given that GeoPix excels at doing 3D content projection, it made sense as it allowed Creative Director Jake Snider, to make content specifically for different regions of space, as well as some global content that passed all of the leds simultaneously.
While GeoPix provided the framework through which to map 30+ content streams onto their respective target pixels, we also needed a totally independent piece of software to handle the generation of that content, that would also communicate with other systems on the network, synchronizing with the audio and additional lighting systems, as well as some interactive elements in the space, that guests could trigger causing a temporary animation to play in the space.
For this, I built a rough draft remotely before the onsite month of January, and once on site we refined this software into a sort of timeline based fixed playback system that contained many cues, for different moments in the half hour audio track.
The LED tunnel that connected The Factory to several areas in the DramCorp offices was unique, in that the installation was made almost entirely from led strips laid out along the hallway, creating an array of pixels dense enough to make more hybrid content possible.
Instead of linear strip chases and things like that, we were able to move into the realm of creating low res 2d scenes, that would render unwrapped, around the entire hallway.
I did some work on the system architecture here, but really my primary task, and what I spent a good half of my onsite days doing was was developing content for this tunnel, and working with feedback and resolution constraints to make visual landscapes that would move and react to spatialized audio cues.
The audio was produced in Ableton, but rendered out with associated spatialization information. The multi channel audio and spatial data was played back over the speaker arrays using Max. Max sent the recorded data to TouchDesigner as OSC messages, which I would ingest and use to drive various elements of the scenes.
The results were immersive and entrancing.
Directly above, you can see some examples of the TouchDesigner scene as it looked before it got mapped to leds on the right. On the left, you can see what the raw texture looked like, before being mapped or sampled.
It's important to simulate the real life leds as much as possible in terms of pixel density and spacing when building content because the density, spacing, and layout drastically impacts how the content that is developed will look. The content on the right looks blurry, extremely saturated and a bit cheesy. However on the leds it achieves the desired effect, and in the end that's all that matters!
The LED product used here had 1 addressable pixel for every 3 physical pixels, so this would cause the content to be interpolated in such a way that every 3 pixels down the strip showed the exact same values. This can cause visual banding if the content is too high frequency, so emulating all of these attributes in 3d made for a very smooth transition to working onsite with the content we already had.
This particular LED piece was a supporting part of a much bigger, perhaps the biggest individual "room" in the space, the Projected Desert (Coco Labs). The narrative idea was that the "Source", which is being produced in The Factory connected to this area, was leaking out into the desert, resulting in mutated and psychedelic phenomena.
The led floor that I built the software for was a work of genius considering the constraints and challenges with installing it. The heavy glass etched tiles had already been laid, leaving only a gap to slide flexible and cuttable paper LED product into from the sides. Jon Haas was the lead video and lighting designer on this element.
This was also nearing the end of my available time in Vegas, and since this install was taking some extra time I busied myself with building and preparing a full pixel mapping software frontend that could create an instance of the tiles that were being inserted, flash it's pixels in a way that allowed us to identify orientation, and axis flip status, as well. This made it possible to breeze through our pixel mapping process during crunch time in the last few days.
We were provided a pixel map with the intended layout, but as things go there were many tiles and edge cases that changed last minute, and having a visual tool that showed us on screen 1:1 what we saw in the space, made troubleshooting as intuitive as it could be.
Hendee Acres was a smaller relaxing corner of the space, directed and built by Jon Haas as well. My role here was also to build a pixel mapping software patch that could drive a single piece of content over a 2D map of the left and right sides of the space.
I played a very minor but interesting support role here, troubleshooting some issues with a mapped piece of video content that wasn't displaying correctly on the ceiling fixtures.
This involved breaking the problem down to testing individual channels, and changing the mapping system to use whole integer coordinates rather than normalized coordinates which helped us sanity check a few of the first fixtures, and make sure coordinates were correct.
In the end, the confusion ended up being connected to 2 different problems that were compounding together, which always makes for the most bizarre problems that are also rewarding to figure out.
This was the only room in the Omega Mart installation that was allowed to use haze - and a shame! As you can see it adds a lot to the aesthetic.
It allows lighting to permeate a space more thoroughly in indirect ways. It also shortens your view distance, which forces the eye to more local details and makes for a cozier more intimate visual experience.
