River Alive!
River Alive!
Independence Seaport Museum
The interactive wall in the River Alive! exhibit at the Independence Seaport Museum, called the Continuum Wall, is a 32-foot, s-curved projection of the Delaware River watershed. Using physical sensors, visitors spin, blow, and drum to clean up sections of the river. Once the whole river is clean, the wall comes alive as a healthy watershed full of vibrant life.
Built in Unity, River Alive is a large-scale, multiplayer game. The wall features five habitats of the watershed, each with three levels. Visitors level up by interacting with the sensor positioned in front of each zone, and as a zone levels up, it begins to spawn more and more life unique to that habitat. As the whole river gets cleaner, the creatures venture beyond their home zones and roam across the entire wall, exploring the other habitats they might turn up in.
I worked on the characters and the game rules that drove this experience, the leveling, the spawning, and the emergent behavior that let creatures cross the wall as the river recovered. I also implemented our animator's work in Unity, bringing each creature to life with movement unique to the species. Some "hero" creatures, like the otter, have special, randomly triggered behaviors, swimming in a figure eight, circling, or floating up to the surface on their back. Keep an eye out and you might even catch the otter giving a friendly wave and a wink.
Another notable animation is the shader built to clean the water. As users interact, a corresponding animation ripples through the water to indicate progress. Each sensor has a unique water animation.
The scale of the wall was the defining challenge. Rendering the water at full size across 32 curved feet tanked performance, so the fix was to render the water offscreen at a smaller scale, point a secondary camera at it, and scale that finished texture up onto the main wall, keeping the water rich without the performance cost. (The approach was sparked by a brief tutorial I came across here.)
More than anything, River Alive was about building a genuinely fun game at architectural scale, turning a 32-foot museum wall into a playful, hands-on experience about the health of the Delaware River.
Built in Unity. Created at Bluecadet.