On Saturday, we held the first ever Interactive & Immersive Championship. It was a blast. Wowwowowow. We had 29 talented TouchDesigner developers from all over the world competing across two different 1-hour challenges for their chance to show the world their work and win tons of prizes. We thought it’d be great to highlight some of The Championship and what we loved seeing.
The Interactivity Challenge
The first challenge of the day was The Interactivity Challenge. What a blast! The challenge criteria was as follows:
Harness your favourite sensor or realtime input to create a interactive & gamified art piece. Bonus points for effects, flair, and being fun to play! Idea starters: re-imagine a game of Pong for 2020, text-based adventure, physics or simulation-based games, puzzles, kinect-based exercise games, and more!
What we got was a ton of creativity. Everything from Guitar Hero controllers, gloves loaded with sensors, VR headsets, eye tracking. The competitors really stepped up and created some fantastic experiences that I would have enjoyed playing with in real life. Here are some highlights:
One of the fun discoveries is when Harvey Moon heard the judges trying to figure out what kind of input he was using and he gave us a hint! The white blob on screen is eye tracking!
Competitor Da Xu made a fun game where the operator inside of TouchDesigner was running away from an operator that you were dragging around the network. This gave the judges a chuckle!
Another highlight was the great Leap Motion setup that Ori Ben-Shabbat created with it’s beautiful rendering as well!
Honestly I could post a gif of every single competitors entry because so many of them were entertaining and amazing looking. Especially considering they had to build these things in less than an hour!
The Integration Challenge
The Integration Challenge was a totally different ball game! The 1-hour challenge was as follows:
Tap into the wonderful world of live Twitch chat, TouchDesigner, and your favourite secondary application that can integrate with TouchDesigner to create a stunning Twitch-integrated piece! Bonus points for integrations that run in realtime. Commands include colours and shapes: !blue !red !green !black !white !square !circle !triangle. Twitch chat go to town!
Competitors needed to connect TouchDesigner, Twitch chat, and any other application into a single system. Some of the standouts were truly fantastic. We saw competitors integrate Unreal, Blender, Ableton Live, Notch, and even moving into the physical space using Arduinos and mechanical drawing robots!
Dylan Roscover made this really polished Notch, TouchDesigner, and Twitch integration that was really fantastic AND used VR to build the assets!
TouchDesigner artist Synthestruct, Ginger Leigh, created a really unique combination of text-to-speech systems that would integrate with and Ableton Live session she had created that also was lining up with visuals created in TouchDesigner.
Competitor Wladimiro Woyno created an awesome integration in the physical world using an Arduino wrist sensor he made that was controlling his TouchDesigner network in real time.
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These templates shed light into the most useful and sometimes obtuse features of TouchDesigner.
They’re designed to be immediately applicable for the complete TouchDesigner beginner, while also providing inspiration for the advanced user.
One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do was be a judge in The Championship because of how much creativity and ingenuity brought to the table by competitors. I think this was shown in spades with all the creative and interesting integrations people had created between TouchDesigner, live Twitch chat, and their other favourite apps.
Wrap up
We couldn’t be happier with how The Interactive & Immersive Championship has been going so far and we can’t wait for round 2 of The Championship to take place on July 25th from 12pm – 4pm Eastern. If you want more information about how to view it and what prizes are on the line for competitors you can click here to learn more! We look forward to seeing you there!
