I was approached by Brighton based Bite Studio to help them build an interactive window installation for the internationally renowned retail chain GAP. As part of the promotion for the hit childrens animation Rio, GAP transformed their windows into Rio style jungles and beaches.

We built a ‘Samba Dance-off Game’ – enticing children to come up to the windows and dance infront of large screen. When the children dance, characters from the film come onto the screen and dance with them. Dance meters then appear at the top of the screen – 2 children can now compete in a ‘dance-off’, the first of which to fill up the meter is rewarded with an explosion of streamers and confetti raining down on the the characters.

The challenge of detecting and tracking children dancing on a busy high street was an interesting one. I used a Kinect depth camera to capture the scene, and wrote the tracking/display software in C++ using openFrameworks.

The interactive has been drawing huge crowds outside GAP’s flagship Oxford Street store in London as children compete against each other to become a ‘samba superstar’. Surprisingly, just as many adults have been caught ‘shaking their tail feathers’! The project was simultaneously launched in GAP’s London and Paris flagship stores and ran for 1 month.