The Spark
Sven Johnson (Interior Design faculty; Exhibition and Experience Design MA) needed an immersive exhibition centerpiece: elemental video loops living on a curved surface, summonable by visitors. No off-the-shelf mapping tool handled both the curvature and the interaction — so the FRS built one.
In Process
The room answered to a wand. A hand-built Arduino wand, talking over Bluetooth, let a visitor summon each element in turn — the wand's LED shifting to the element's color while the cylinder's projected loop switched to match (Fire, Water, Air, Earth, Ether). Casting the full sequence — every element in order — summoned the Witch to the surface.
The Craft
A Swift/SwiftUI + Metal application built with Windsurf and the AI assistant inside Apple's own developer tools — AI pair-programming driving native GPU code — paired with the Arduino + Bluetooth wand hardware for the physical interaction layer.
Outcome
Corner-pin plus adjustable cylindrical curvature is the trick that lets flat video sit believably on a curved, real-world surface. The larger demonstration: AI-assisted development putting a genuinely specialized interactive system within reach of a faculty exhibition build.
Process — 12 frames
