Planet Earth

Planet Earth is played on the floor. Visitors walk on it rather than watch it: fields of particles scatter around a footstep, currents bend past whoever is standing in them, and the palette moves from particle white through green and gold to a floor of autumn leaves, on a clock of its own. There is no controller, no instruction and no right place to stand.

An Intel RealSense D455 captures depth in real time and converts it into a live 3D point cloud. Optical flow analyses movement across the floor, tracking direction and velocity, and that flow field is what steers the GPU particles — so the visuals answer the audience's presence and movement within a frame.

Because the response is computed from motion rather than from a trigger, it scales from one person to a crowd without anything changing: more people, more flow.

One TouchDesigner network holds all of it: an AI-generated voiceover, GPU particle systems and real-time shader control. Live RealSense input drives the optical-flow states that feed the particles and the shaders, and scene changes are driven by time, so the piece runs itself for as long as the room is open.

Twelve projectors are driven by a single workstation equipped with three GPUs, with HeavyM warping and blending the outputs so the surfaces meet cleanly; the depth camera feeds the same machine, so tracking and rendering never drift apart.