From a glass room placed in city centers, Dries Verhoeven interacts with users of online dating apps like Grindr and Tinder about the nature of intimacy in our era, and asks them to visit him to satisfy his non-sexual desires.

I was asked to create a system for the 12x2m LED screen for the theatrical installation Wanna Play?. This screen shows up to 5 devices that Dries used to talk to the outside world.

Everything in the glass room is visible to the public, so the controls had to be very subtle. Dries could black out certain chats and even change the composition of the screen by placing devices face down on the table.

All chats were blurred by default until the other party agrees to show it. The blur is toggled by subtly holding the device on one side. Image recognition was used to blur out the chats, but always show the input typed by Dries.

The system uses a custom iOS app for controlling the composition and a custom Cinder application with custom openGL shaders generating the images on the back wall.