Whilst at Tellart, the studio was commissioned to create an installation for ‘The Future is Now’ Exhibition at the V&A, London. The flagship exhibition brought together ‘100 objects as a landscape of possibilities for the near future.’
The Terraform Table is a three-dimensional tangible user interface that utilizes a sand table, depth camera, and a projector to create an interactive experience. The depth camera relays height data to a Generative Adversarial Network trained on thousands of satellite images of mountains and valleys. The projector then displays the newly generated image back onto the sand table. Users can freely sculpt the sand, shaping their own combinations of ice peak mountains and deep blue seas in real-time interactivity, creating a playful dialogue with a neural network.
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My role in the project was to curate, train, and perfect the Neural Network that was to be displayed. Using QGIS, it was my task to select areas of natural beauty and train them with the corresponding height map data. I trained over forty models and collated thousands of images. To start the project, I trained models and made changes to the datasets using inductive and deductive reasoning to test hypotheses. But through the process, I gained an intuitive understanding of the Pix2Pix network, which greatly accelerated the development. The project was featured on Dezeen.