Real-Time Systems

Real-time engines, shaders and show networks, built to be operated by a tired person in the dark.

Most of our work runs live: an engine that generates the image on the night, reacts to the room and keeps running when the room does not behave. The stack is TouchDesigner and GLSL, but the pipeline matters more than the tool. The look usually starts in a GLSL shader rather than in a node chain, so the whole system has one source of truth and a palette change happens in one place instead of sixteen. TouchDesigner then does what it is genuinely good at: routing, mapping and live control. NDI carries output to the media machines. Performance discipline is not optional at scale, so we cook on demand, watch viewer flags and keep simulation resolution small. Beyond the computer, the same pipeline reaches hardware: Arduino boards, ultrasonic sensors, DMX interfaces, LED panels, microphone arrays. And it ends in writing, with a setup document, a runbook and a component inventory, because on a show with sensors and multiple machines the network diagram is as much a deliverable as the visuals.

• ▸A single shader driving many surfaces
• ▸Browser-based fallback generator alongside the main project
• ▸Runbook and network documentation delivered with the build
• ▸Systems recoverable in under two minutes under stage lights