Otherworld Ohio // Columbus

Otherworld Ohio is a 40,000 sq ft immersive art experience implementing 68 projectors, 2 km of addressable LED tape, 20 PCs, over 100 mcu’s, and 16 spatial lidars. As Technical Director of Otherworld I developed and built all major technical componants, and led a team of 4-6 technicians during the build phase and into operation. In this role I also worked with teams of animators and sound designers to generate the large amounts of media needed for the exhibits, and integrated these across a wide variety of media workflows.

I developed these exhibits using Touchdesigner and Arduino, and implemented a full automation dashboard which displays the health of all parts of all exhibits, along with reset and troubleshooting controls. Care was taken to make sure that all exhibits are easy to troubleshoot and service, and custom internal tools were built to automate or assist calibration of projectors and sensors. Exhibit disk images were redundantly backed up, allowing for extremely low downtime in the case of PC failure, which was rare. When possible, optical and lidar systems were used to detect interactions, dramatically cutting maintenance, while in other cases air blasts, electromagnets, fans, RFID, and a variety of sensors were integrated into custom built props for a more hands on feel.