Case study / Golisano Children's Hospital
Interactive Ocean Wall
A walk down a hospital hallway is usually a walk to something: an appointment, a scan, a treatment. At Golisano Children's Hospital of Southwest Florida in Fort Myers, the hallway between two wings of the hospital is now the fun part.
The challenge
Kids and their families walk that hallway every day, often on the way to something stressful. The hospital and Treehouse Immersive wanted to fill it with an underwater world that notices you: a video wall where the ocean reacts as you go by.
That meant the wall had to see everyone in the hallway, in real time, along its whole length: kids of every size, whole families at once, people walking past at full speed. No buttons, no controllers, and nothing anyone has to touch. A wall that lags, misses a kid, or needs someone to restart it is worse than no wall at all, so it also had to run all day, every day, on its own.
What we built
We designed the experience, built the software, and integrated the system. Treehouse Immersive installed the AV hardware, configured it on site, and worked with the hospital.
Walk up to the wall and a glowing outline of you appears in the water. Then the ocean starts paying attention:
- Touch a pufferfish and it puffs up, then turns into a beach ball.
- Boop the crab three times and it turns red and runs around.
- Pop the numbered bubbles in order and a treasure chest opens, with confetti and fanfare.
- Reach for the scallops and they turn into steel drums.
- Get close to a school of fish and it swims away from you.
Getting a hallway to see took some experimenting. We tried several vision systems before landing on the right one: a lightweight AI model from ByteDance that pulls each person's silhouette out of live video in real time. Multiple webcams cover the length of the wall, and OBS and our custom Unity app stitch them into one view of the whole hallway. The Unity app runs the ocean itself, placing every silhouette in the water and deciding what each fish, crab, and bubble does when someone reaches it.
The result
What used to be just a walk between two wings of the hospital is now a few minutes of play: chasing fish, hunting for the numbered bubbles, trying to turn the crab red. For a moment, kids forget they're in a hospital.
It's our second project for Golisano Children's Hospital, after the Immersive Treatment Room.
Building something like this?
Tell us what you're working on, even if you don't know exactly how to build it yet. We'll tell you honestly how we'd approach it.
