A forest that changes where you stand

This is a school project I started in TouchDesigner in September 2026: a forest projection in which the seasons flow into each other. Where you stand, a patch of another season opens up, so spring can bloom in the middle of a snowy winter forest. The project is still in development.

How it works

The projection uses one forest scene in several seasons, each with the same composition so the versions line up. My own tracking app detects people with a camera and sends their positions over OSC. A tracker component I built in TouchDesigner reads up to 25 people and can switch between the live tracker and a simulator with virtual visitors.

Each position is smoothed, mapped to the width of the wall and used as the centre of a round mask. I blur the mask and distort it with noise, so the edge between seasons looks organic instead of cut out. One season is multiplied by the mask, the other by its inverse, and the two are added together. Switches and cross-fades choose which seasons are in play, and a presence signal fades the effect in and out.

Building and testing

The network has three parts: the season clips with their switches and cross-fades, the mask, and the tracking input. The simulator let me test everything on my laptop without a camera. Raw tracking data jitters, so I added smoothing and a limit that keeps the window on the wall. To check the colours and soft edges at full size, I projected it onto a wall at home.

Next steps

Next I will switch to the live tracker and test with real people in front of the projection. The project builds on my growing tree experiment from this summer, but now tracking, masking and blending all live in one network.