I was working for Imaginex on this project. It really stands out in my memory as a fun but crazy fast paced gig. Taylor Swift played a pre-super bowl concert called Super Saturday.

Part of what made this so hectic was how many moving parts there were. An interactive Touchscreen application, a 3D scene on the video wall showing real-time updates of guest submissions, 12 Touchscreen systems running at the same time, and active coordination with a T-Shirt printing company who was fully staffed and pushing shirts out as fast as they could next to us.

Last but not least we had an unstoppable wall of many hundreds of people shoulder to shoulder, eagerly waiting to get their turn at designing their t-shirt. This was pretty much a non stop marathon of 3+ hours managing the tech, keeping the t-shirt designs moving to the printing company, and fixing issues as they happened, customer service, etc.

My responsibilities were many on this project, ranging from application development, to networking and infrastructure design, as well as fully prototyping out the installation on all hardware prior to getting onsite.

While at my home, Imaginex shipped all the hardware I'd be needing to test with. I went to Home Depot to pick up a few things to make it possible to simulate the official setup and layout. It was this process that made setup onsite go so smoothly, and allowed me to prepare for several edge cases I didn't discover until setting it all up.

The Touch Screen application was fairly straight forward. I was handed a style guide, which I followed as I built out the functionality. The user approached the screen, agreed to terms, then entered a name and proceeded to the design screen.

Once they were finished, they would submit the design, and it would go to a shared network folder, named with their name, and a batch number and index number.

The t-shirt company would sift through this folder, grabbing the first one off the top, printing it, bagging it, and once the guest picked up their shirt that design file would get moved to a separate archive folder and the process would continue.

While all this was happening, as t-shirt designs were submitted they were also copied to another folder, where a separate TouchDesigner process was watching a folder, and every time a new t-shirt design would show up, it would overwrite the oldest shirt design with that new one, and this would cause the 3D simulation to spin the t-shirt geometry around, updating it at the same time.

This was partially advertising and partially to let guests know their t-shirt was on the move, and gave their design a little publicity in the process.