After a hiatus of four years, Washed Out released their third full length album, Mister Mellow. The band commissioned short films for nearly every track so it could be played as a visual album, and as a part of the tour, we sought to extend this even further out into the real world to let fans be completely immersed in the performance.

I worked as a part of a small team to figure out how to bring real-time interactivity to a touring show, and then build a tour-able kit. It needed to be portable, reliable, and work in different stage formats as the size of venues varied quite a bit throughout the dates. We wanted to match the aesthetic of the videos and the album as a whole, so we concentrated on creating a suite of effects based around silhouettes and analog video feedback.

I created a custom C++ application to handle input from 3 Kinects and transmit the data over a network in real-time. The data could then be used to create effects that could be combined in different ways and feed back into one another. The software was not only a means to author the effects, but also tied in with midi and osc messages to respond to the music as it was played. The same piece of software drives the performance during the show, and additionally integrates with Resolume for high quality video playback, and Ableton for tight time synching.