Phantom Pulse - CASE STUDY
A six-stage build: 3D-scan a real flower, plug it into a Playtronica Biotron, drive a TouchDesigner particle system off the biosignal stream, render the twin through a holographic dome, score it with Santino Castagna, and ship the whole thing to an outdoor screen. This is the working log of how it came together.
BUNJIL PLACE · 2024
PROCESS
From scan to dome to
outdoor screen
Eight stages took the bloom from a real flower to a reactive twin breathing on the Bunjil Place outdoor screen.
01
CONCEPT
A real flower meets its twin
We started with a single question: what would it look like if a flower had a digital ghost - something that could breathe,
dissolve, and respond? The brief came from RMIT MAGI's Floribunda response: respond to the exhibition with a poetic
interactive piece.
02
SCAN
Photogrammetry & 3D capture
Multi-angle photogrammetry passes turned a physical bloom into a high-density point cloud . The seed dataset for
every digital twin. We tested fresh flowers, dried flowers, and partially-wilted flowers to see how decay translated
to particles.
03
SIGNAL
Playtronica Biotron biosignal mapping
The Playtronica Biotron reads natural inputs — touch, light, water, electrical conductivity and emits them as MIDI.
Each input channel was assigned a parameter in TouchDesigner: density, dispersion, glow, decay.
04
SYSTEM
TouchDesigner particle pipeline
Built the reactive system in TouchDesigner: 3D-scan geometry → particle emitters → biosignal modulators → render.
Every frame, audience proximity rewrites the modulators, which feed the emitters, which redraw the flower.
05
DISPLAY
Holographic dome → iPad → projection
Prototyped on a small holographic pyramid, then scaled to an iPad-fed dome, then onto the Bunjil Place outdoor
screen. Each medium needed different particle counts and gamma curves.
06
SOUND
Santino's reactive score
Santino Castagna composed a score that listens to the particle state when the bloom dissolves, the score thins;
when it re-forms, harmonics return. The audio is layered, not continuous, so silence remains part of the piece.
07
TUNING
Proximity falloff & dissolve curves
Tuned the dissolve so the bloom rewarded slow approach and punished crowding. Dozens of in-room walkthroughs
to find the falloff that read as breath, not glitch and to make stillness, not movement, the trigger that re-forms
the flower.
08
INSTALL
Outdoor screen deployment
Re-graded the patch for Bunjil Place's outdoor screen against ambient daylight, scaled the particle counts for the
bigger canvas, and locked the loop to a 3-minute cycle so it could slot into the 3pm and 7pm daily screenings.
OUTCOME · FEATURED AT BUNJIL PLACE
From scan to outdoor screen
The original ask was poetic: a flower with a digital ghost, something that could breathe and dissolve and respond. The
outcome was concrete. Phantom Pulse was selected for the MAGI Floral Animations response to Bunjil Place's
Floribunda exhibition and played daily on the outdoor screen for the run.
MAGI Floral Animations · Bunjil Place
Bunjil Place Outdoor Screen · 2 Patrick Northeast Drive, Narre Warren · Jul 1–31, 2024 · 3pm & 7pm daily
Student animators from RMIT University's Master of Animation, Games and Interactivity responding to the Floribunda exhibition.
Phantom Pulse showed alongside Flare by Cao Xuefan.
Upcoming · in process — SIGGRAPH Asia · Art Gallery · 2026 · In submission
Thank you for stepping into my story!
Got a vision whispering to you? Let’s bring it to life!
salihamurtaza774@gmail.com
