University of the Future

TU/e's Innovation Space was exploring what a university could look like in 2050, built around learners collaborating across disciplines instead of students sitting in separate courses. For Dutch Design Week 2024, they wanted to turn that idea into something visitors could actually feel in a few minutes, not just read about. The brief was to build an interactive showcase of that future university, made for a large touch table at the exhibition with several people standing around it and playing at once.

The whole thing runs on one shared touch table with multiple player panels arranged around it, each one rotated to face outward toward the person standing on that side. Rather than build a single state machine, I structured the app as small, independent scripts per screen that talk to each other through PlayCanvas's event system: a language screen fires an event, the next screen listens for it and takes over, and so on. That kept each panel simple to reason about while letting many of them run in sync off one shared game state.

Each visitor picks a language, reads a short intro (timed to the length of its voiceover clip so it never feels rushed or cut off), picks a "passion" area under a countdown, then plays a drag-and-drop challenge: dragging activity cards into a clock face to decide how they'd invest their time on a real societal challenge, like dementia care or climate change. Dragging in PlayCanvas doesn't map cleanly onto raw screen coordinates, so I converted the drop-zone shapes into pixel space up front and ran a simple point-in-polygon check against the live mouse position to detect a correct drop.

Once everyone's chosen, the table shows each player's answer as a glowing point on the shared campus illustration, with lines drawing between players whose choices connect, followed by a combined "impact" visualization on a rotating globe. It's a simple way of turning individual choices into a shared, visible outcome without needing real backend logic behind it. I built and shaped this experience solo, working directly against the DDW installation's hardware setup rather than a generic desktop layout.

A multi-panel PlayCanvas installation for a large touch table, playable by several visitors at once, each on their own synced panel. A roughly 6-minute flow takes each player from language and role selection through a timed drag-and-drop challenge to a personal and combined impact visualization, closing with a QR code inviting them to continue the conversation about TU/e's future beyond the table.

The installation was shown at Dutch Design Week 2024, hosted at the Enversed Experience Center on Strijp-S. It was my first time building something meant to run on shared physical hardware with multiple simultaneous touch inputs rather than a single desktop or mobile screen, which pushed me to think differently about layout, synchronization, and pacing across panels that all had to feel like one coherent experience.