Boston Children's Hospital · 2012 — 2014
An Interactive World for Young Patients
A permanent installation — still running today — that turned a hospital wall into a living, playful world of interactive animated characters across immersive scenes, designed to calm and delight children during difficult visits.
- Client
- Boston Children's Hospital
- Role
- Design & Animation (Graduate Research)
- Year
- 2012 — 2014
- Disciplines
- Experiential, Interactive, Motion, Illustration, Character Design
The Challenge
A children’s hospital is an anxious place. The brief was to transform a passive corridor into an experience that gave young patients a moment of wonder and a sense of control — at architectural scale, and durable enough to live for years.
The Approach
Over two years I contributed to the design and animation of a cast of 100+ characters and the scenes they inhabit, tuning motion and interaction so the wall responded to children in real time. The result is empathetic design at its most literal: art direction in service of comfort.
Bringing It to Life
Design was only half of it. I worked closely with engineers and the technical team to bring the digital assets to life — animating the characters and scenes, then building them into a real-time interactive system in Unity, driven by a Microsoft Kinect sensor that let the wall see and respond to children as they moved. Turning static illustration into a living, motion-triggered environment meant designing every asset for interaction from the very start.