A summer experiment

I built this experiment at my desk at home in July 2026, during the summer holiday. At Plakwerk I had used body tracking to move a character along with visitors. This time I wanted to see what happens when tracking drives something slower and more organic: a tree that grows.

How it works

A webcam on top of the monitor films the room. My own tracking app finds the person in the image and sends their position to TouchDesigner over OSC.

That position moves a glowing blue ring across the ground of the scene, so you can see where the system places you. A small sprout with hanging vines grows out of the ring and travels with you. In the middle, under a night sky with stars and a moon, a tree grows in stages: a thin sapling, a branching trunk and finally a full crown with small blossoms. The leaves are small low-poly shapes repeated along the branches, which keeps the scene light enough to run in real time. At the end of the cycle the tree drops its leaves, shrinks back and starts again.

How I made it

I worked with two screens: the tree on the main monitor and the tracking app on a second screen, so I could see what the camera detected. I built the scene in three layers that I could adjust separately: the ring that follows the tracked position, the sprout that grows from it, and the main tree with its growth stages.

What I learned

A tracked position does not have to control a character. It can shape a whole environment, and a visible marker like the ring tells people that the scene reacts to them. The same pipeline, from webcam to tracking app to TouchDesigner, returns in my seasons forest projection.