Interactive Train Mural

This project was for Holfman Wolk Orthodontics. Studio Y Creations was hired to create an interactive sculpted mural that worked as a metaphor for the stages of appointments that a patient would go through on their journey to getting braces. Studio Y came to me to create the software that would allow the dental assistants to load an avatar for the child and their appropriate location on the train in relation to their progress with their appointments. Other than the initial character line art and the background mural art everything else from the programming and animation was created by myself.

The first challenge was to figure out how to have one seamless experience across 4 separate monitors with a combined total resolution of 5440x768. Two issues forced me to build the application as two separate programs that would talk to each other. The first issue was that Flash's maximum document length was 2880 and the second was that with the Nvidia drivers you can only span a single desktop across two monitors. The next sticky issue was how do you ensure that when the computer boots and loads the two programs that each one goes to the appropriate spanned desktop? Thankfully I was able to find a program called UltraMon that would allow you to specify what monitor a application was started on.

With the logistic issues out of the way I built the application in Flash CS4 with Actionscript 3 using a Model, View, Controller design pattern. The characters were animated using Flash's bone animation system and the rest of the animation was scripted with the help of the excellent animation tweening engine TweenLite. The application is controlled rather simply with a small wireless keyboard. A single key press to load a male or female and different ethnic avatar and then a second key press to place them in the appropriate train car. When the user is ready another key press will start the character walking to the next train car.