Grounded Interaction

Illuminarium’s Wild-A Safari Experience

Illuminarium's pitch is "VR without the glasses" — a reprogrammable immersive theater where RadicalMedia's 4K footage of African wildlife wraps the walls. Our job at Bang + Mash was the other half of the room: the 10,000 sqft floor underneath the audience, and the interactive layer that made the space respond to the people moving through it.

I led the team of artists and developers building that layer. We used LiDAR to track guests through the venue in real time and fed that positional data into the story. Footsteps bloomed behind you as you walked. Puddles rippled and splashed when you jumped in them. Butterflies scattered as you approached. And when two guests stood apart from each other, we drew shooting stars between them — a quiet bit of choreography that turned strangers into collaborators without ever telling them to interact.

That last one mattered most to me. The floor wasn't a game layer bolted onto a film; it was the thing that made the room communal. You could feel the audience notice each other.

We built the first version in Unity, then rebuilt in Unreal once we hit the ceiling of what disguise could drive at the resolution and sync we needed across the projector array. The rebuild wasn't glamorous, but it's the kind of call you make when the pixels on the floor have to hold up against 4K cinematic content on the walls — anything less and the illusion cracks.

WILD opened in Atlanta in July 2021 and Las Vegas at AREA15 in January 2022, running daily to thousands of guests across both venues. The interactive floor has since become a signature of what an Illuminarium is — the part you can't film, the part that only works because you're in the room.