math square interactive floor (Museum of Math)

Math Square is 10,000+ pixels of floor interaction exploration. As part of Manhattan’s MoMath museum opening exhibit, Math Square provides nine different multi-person experiences on its surface. Want to see the shortest routes between you and your friends? There’s a traveling-saleman mode for that. Perhaps you want to see reaction-diffusion based on where everyone is standing in the space? Fractals dance from your feet, and simple game mazes away you and your neighbor’s engagement.

Additional modes like spanning-tree and voronoi visualizations were also on a typical day’s rotation.

An example of the voronoi mode in action.

Some behind-the-scenes, bruteforcing hundreds of fractals simultaneously with the use of a special interaction wand (or a broom).

Behind-the-scenes, we gathered all the data into an openCV-like environment where we did blob detection. The clumping of these blobs gave us “feet”, and general distances between those feet gave us “bodies”, which we used to create the various game modes.

Write-up in the NYTimes