Nike - House of Go
Installation treadmill & LED wall
This was a physical installation project I worked on with Hexagon Misfit for Nike’s new launch of their Nike React Flyknit shoe, where they took over a space in downtown Chicago, converting it into an immersive playground centered around their new shoe.
For this installation, up to three participants run on a giant floor treadmill together and see themselves represented as running avatars on the LED panels via Kinect tracking. At the end of the experience, they receive a video “boomerang” of them running.
We handled all the software and hardware tracking side, working in Unity to visualize the kinect data as avatars and TouchDesigner to glue everything together and handle the automated boomerang style video recording and saving.
Process
The first prototypes tested whether we could reliably track multiple runners with Kinects, and explored visual styles — starting with 3D point clouds since they mapped naturally onto the Kinect data, then pivoting to a specific 2D character style once the art direction was set. Mapping 3D skeletal data onto a stylized 2D avatar took a lot of experimentation, but the simplest approach won out: track each runner’s root position and attach a self-animating 2D avatar that blends between poses (walk, run, hands in the air, etc).
For the boomerang video, I used TouchDesigner to capture and reverse the footage, then Python and ffmpeg to splice the two together — with multi-threading to avoid frame hitches during processing.
