A welcome for Plakwerk 2026

Plakwerk 2026, a signmaking event at Nimeto Utrecht on 16 and 17 April, was about the future of sign and digital signage. For the entrance hall I made an interactive projection: a long wall where two robots float through a sci-fi corridor, next to the Plakwerk logo and the line “De toekomst van signmaking”.

Walk along the wall and the robots drift with you, wave and say goodbye in a speech balloon. By a door, a single robot works as a living sign, welcoming visitors and reminding them that parking is paid.

How it works

Projectors on a scaffold rig light up the wall. A depth camera on top of the wall watches the walkway. It measures distance, so it sees people as bodies, not pixels.

In TouchDesigner I take a visitor’s horizontal position, smooth it with a filter and a lag, and use it to move the robot. A switch picks the animation clip: flying, waiting, waving or flying back. An LFO adds a slow floating motion, and a Python script tracks each robot’s state and decides when to switch clips.

From test to event

I ran the first test on 9 March 2026 in the Immersive classroom, projecting an early robot at wall size. By early April the tracking network had a separate chain for each robot. During the event I fine-tuned the setup from a laptop behind the wall.

A lighter version

In June 2026 I rebuilt the tracking at home with a normal webcam. I wrote my own tracking app: it runs on the laptop’s GPU, finds people in the image and sends their position to TouchDesigner over OSC, with the video shared through Spout. It also has a movement trail, a heatmap and a privacy blur. I added a robot holding an arrow sign to point people the right way. This version needs less hardware, so it travels more easily.