Lots of brands these days put giant video walls in their stores, but how many of them let you go wild and play with them? Vans let us do it, and we built a system that allowed anyone walking in the front door to play, too.

We provided a selection of pre-cut material (Vans ads, skateboarding and surfing videos, etc.) as well as live inputs (an industrial imaging camera pointing at you and your friends, an IP camera stream from the mini skate-park in the basement).

And then we let you mess with the outputs with a wide variety of custom-built visual effects filters, controlled by MIDI: foot switches, foot pedals and an AKAI controller with a variety of knobs and squishy pads.

Visitors could even live-remix the music playing in the store (at least, in the foyer area) since I hooked up the store's existing Dante audio stream and made some fun audio filters you could trigger with the same knobs, pedals and buttons we provided for the video effects.

And what about TouchDesigner? I have nothing against visual programming environments (I love Cables.GL for example) but TouchDesigner somehow manages to combine a lot of power (and support for all kinds of hardware) with an infuriatingly terrible UI and a baffling Python API. Still, I knew it was the best tool for the job, because it is undeniably good at making wild visual effects with little or no code. That meant I could lean on a group of 4 enthusiastic designers (not coders) to produce a big variety of visual effects, while I concentrated on tying all the bits together and making the system behave.

It was also a chance to practise building a completely custom PC with the right specs for the job - and frankly for the aesthetics, since we found a lovely rack-mountable case with a ridiculously oversized cooling vent that really suited the custom "carry case" rack that it would live in.

More detail at https://random.studio/projects/an-audio-visual-jambox-for-vans-in-milan

To top it all, I had some fun composing the music for the video (see below).