Google NYC Lobby Flowers

Flowers is a graceful and dynamic installation made up of 160 electromechanical flowers that suspend from the ceiling of Google's 9th Ave lobby in NYC.

That's me at 0:42!

The flowers open and close in response to the movement of people in the lobby and outside on the street, creating a living, breathing sculpture that reflects the activity of the space.

I built all of the software for the project, including:

  • Real-time people tracking using depth camera data
  • Privacy-preserving sensing using depth data only, with no facial recordings
  • Projection and mapping from physical world space to the flower installation's coordinate system
  • A gesture recognition system that let people trigger special flower animations through poses
  • A remote control dashboard for operating and monitoring the installation
  • Serial communication with the flower hardware to control opening and closing behavior