Cafe Culture

Cafe Culture is an exhibit at the Sazerac House which guides visitors through stories and recipes illustrating the history of cocktail culture in New Orleans. The experience is activated when a visitor places one of three types of coasters on the table, each bringing to life a unique set of interactive animations on the table's stone-top surface.

The exhibit consists of animations projected onto the table, made interactive by a middleware IR camera from Ubi Interactive with a custom 360-degree IR light emitter at the center of the table. A Flir Blackfly camera is used for capturing the coaster shapes using CV software.

The animations are driven by Unity. The coaster shapes are detected using OpenCV in a background process written in python. Windows native touch is utilized with Ubi middleware.

I brought the development of the table from alpha through install, which involved the creation of new features such as the tracking of the position of the coasters on the table so that animations follow, a system for mitigating light feedback for the Flir CV camera which captures the projected surface, and a customized app monitoring process for the backend. Bryan Ma architected the software through alpha. UX by Noa Dolberg, Julie Flechoux did visual design and Shwenn Chang created the motion graphics.