Interactive & Exhibit Design.

Escape Rooms, In Person and Remote

I worked as Manager at an escape room company in Portland that ran themed rooms for the public. I helped design two of their games, one built for a room and one built to be played over the internet when the rooms could not open, and I made the animation for a third. I also created the operating materials that helped staff run every game in the building.

Unicorn Birthday Party

I helped design this in-person room, and I made the animation for one of its puzzles. Players place tagged objects on a physical board built to look like a side-on platform game. An RFID reader identifies which object is sitting in which position, and a projector throws an animated meerkat onto the board. The meerkat then tries to cross the board, and the route it takes depends on what the players have put where. Getting the arrangement right releases an electromagnet, and a key drops.

A ladder lets the meerkat climb, a trampoline bounces it up a level, a banana draws it across, and a spider turns it back. The projection had to answer the moment a group moved a piece, and answer the same way every time, so every reachable arrangement is its own rendered clip, chosen as soon as the tags change.

The Truth About Edith

I helped design this remote escape game, built during COVID-19 so groups could play from their own homes. Four players join in a browser and each is given a different role: three operate colour-coded instrument panels, and the fourth reads the clues that say what to do with them. Nobody can see the whole puzzle, so solving it means describing to each other what you are each looking at, which is the part of an escape room that disappears when everyone is in a different house. The game ran ninety minutes with a live Cluemaster and an actor on the call.

Three puzzles I worked on

A robotic arm, driven from a browser. I designed a puzzle in which players operate a real robotic arm over the web to move chess pieces. The page they get is deliberately plain: power on and off, and four directional controls. Behind it a small server on a Raspberry Pi passes each press to the arm, and a camera streams the board back so players can see what their instructions actually did. Nobody in the group is in the same room as the hardware they are moving.

Security footage and a scrubber. I helped design a puzzle built around reviewing recorded video, where the work is knowing which moment matters and going back to it. We made the controls deliberately awkward. A scrubber that lands exactly where you point it turns the puzzle into a search that is over in a minute. One that overshoots makes a group slow down, say out loud where they want to look, and pass control between them, which is the behaviour the puzzle is for. The judgement is how far to push that before awkward stops being interesting, and that line moves depending on who is playing.

A bulletin board system I built for the game. I designed a puzzle around a BBS, the kind of dial-up text service that predates the web, and built the system it runs on. Players navigate it by typing, and the screens it serves are ANSI art: images drawn entirely out of coloured character cells.

I also wrote the Cluemaster's command reference for this game, including a quiet hint that can be pushed to the players' screen without spending one of their three official clues.

Boobano Farm

Boobano Farm was the company's other remote game, built for larger groups and structured so that players split into two sides on each puzzle and work out the answer from what everyone else is doing. I created the animation for it, built the same way as the meerkat, in separate parts so it could be moved.

Room Escape Artist interviewed the company about both remote games in June 2021, covering how they were built and the asymmetric design the two share. That interview describes the games, not my part in them. Read the interview

The building's rooms ran on networked Raspberry Pis, one per subsystem, with sensors and RFID triggering audio, video and lighting states. I operated and maintained those systems and troubleshot them during live games. Most of those rooms were designed before I arrived. Unicorn Birthday Party is the one I helped design.

Projection Mapping and Live Visuals

I have designed and built sets for stage productions, and run the visual effects for them. On Metamorphosis and Sweeney Todd I did projection mapping, fitting projected imagery to the actual geometry of the set so that surfaces built out of flats and platforms could change what they were made of during a scene. Mapping to a physical object is the part that takes the time: the projector has to be surveyed against the built geometry, and anything that moves afterwards has to be surveyed again.

I did the visual effects for two dance performances. The first used animated backdrops and projections that I created from artwork the students in the company made, alongside a table I modelled and 3D printed for them to dance with. The second read the dancers themselves: a depth sensor tracked their movement, the visuals responded to it and to the audio, and I operated the effects live from the booth while the piece ran. Performing the visuals live lets the show breathe with the dancers, and it also means there is no take two.

At The Webb Schools, I was trained to operate the campus theater's Crestron control system and lighting and sound boards, and I ran special effects for multiple productions.

Screens in a Building.

I made work for the large screen in the lobby of the Gates building at The Thacher School and for other screens placed around the building, most of it in TouchDesigner. It ran continuously through the day. The pieces on the touch screens answered where you put a finger, and one rippled like reflections on water.

Fabrication, Makerspaces, and Young Audiences

I design and run makerspaces, and I teach the courses that fill them. Students build physical interactive work with microcontrollers, sensors and fabrication tools, then show it publicly. I have handled the equipment side of that too: purchasing, installation, commissioning, safety and training people to use it, including standing up a new fabrication facility at another school.

I also make sculpture through photogrammetry and 3D printing. At Thacher I installed a printed piece on a plinth beside a wall-mounted screen showing the reconstructions.

The Metamorphoses page has more of this work, the teaching page has the curriculum, and the art portfolio has the rest.

Building for Children and the People Teaching Them

Slime in the Coconut is a site about slime, made for the audience that actually cares about slime. It carries recipes that work, a set of tap-only games, a video feed, and a free slime science curriculum written for teachers, which is the part that ties the play back to polymer chemistry.