Green Avatar

How can we motivate workshop participants to let loose?

The Deloitte Greenhouse is a workshop space in Berlin, focused on exploring innovative technologies. Its nature themed rooms offer various workshop facilitation possibilities and are filled to the brim with up and coming tech.

But as with every other workshop space, getting people going at a workshop day’s beginning is a challenge: People often feel a litte uncomfortable in these open social situations.

The installation Green Avatar serves as a kind of icebreaker, situated at the workshop space’s entrance. With nobody interacting, the installation, fitted into the fixture in the room, almost blends in with the green surroundings of the room. Its large vertical screen shows the leafs of a hedge, subtly swaying in the wind.

Yet, as soon as a person walks by in front of the screen, the installation reacts, showing the person’s silhouette emerging in the leaves, before they suddenly come crashing down. At the same time, ivy ranks and leaves grow on the interacting person’s reflection, moving and swaying with the person’s movement. The stronger the interaction, the stronger the installation’s visual reaction, prompting the workshop participants to try out their wildest dance moves in front of the screen – and in front of others, simply: to let loose.

Results & Process

Unfortunately, I cannot share too much of the production process of this project!

VFX Madness

I can only say that it was the most VFX intensive project I’ve ever programmed and that the Unity VFX graph took on absurd proportions during the project before I finally cleaned it up again. Here’s a snippet of it 😉

… But Also A Lot Of Fun

Nevertheless, it was also one of the most fun projects. Here’s a video proof!