A tablet installation about the last night of a building before it is demolished.

Unity · iPad Game · June 2026 · Collaboration Work

Concept

A tablet based interactive story about an old yellow building on the last day before it is demolished. Visitors look across at the building through a neighbouring window, peering into nine lit rooms as the residents prepare for their final night.

This piece starts from a real window. Davin, a member of our team, lives across from the Immeuble Place des Augustins in Geneva, and the daily habit was simply to look out at the lit windows opposite, catching fragments of lives belonging to people whose names you never learn. The tablet based interactive story rebuilds that vantage point: you stand where Davin stands, looking across through a neighbouring window into nine lit rooms. It is an autoethnographic work, built from the ordinary position of the witness across the street.

What you find when you look in is a building full of life. A man works late. A child lies shyly against the bed, and if you click him he peeks out to say hi. An old woman makes a phone call. A couple bickers with the dancers next door. Nothing here is exceptional. These are ordinary, everyday moments, the small texture of nine representative lives held inside one structure, a cross-section of the different kinds of people a building like this holds. This is not only the story of one yellow building that may face demolition. It is a single case standing in for a wider phenomenon: the disruption that demolition and displacement bring to Geneva.

A cat moves through all of it, crossing balconies, slipping between windows. It belongs to everyone and to no one, the social thread that ties nine separate rooms into one community. If this building were torn demolished, the residents would leave, one by one. The rooms would empty out, room by room, until the building stood hollow. The cat would have nowhere left to go. Were its home demolished, it might cross the street to the observer's building, where you have been watching all along. The community would be gone, the view from your window gone with it.

The piece asks a simple question: if this building is demolished, what happens to the memories of the people who lived here? Rather than tell that story head-on, the installation lets a visitor peek into the building and experience the residents' rituals in fragmentary, semi-autonomous vignettes — snippets of lives captured in moments of care.

What I built

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  A four-state loop (Screensaver, Interactive, Dissolving, Ending) that restarts itself.

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  Interaction logic for all nine rooms, including cross-room linkage: clicking the complaining couple in C3 removes dancers and ducks the music in C2 until the neighbouring room falls silent.

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  Touch input for iPad via IPointerClickHandler and a Physics Raycaster, chosen over a custom raycast system.

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  Animator state machines for every character: randomised idle sets, fixed-order multi-step chains, and locked one-shot completions that cannot be retriggered.

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  A character pipeline from image-to-3D generation through video-based mocap and Unity Avatar retargeting.

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  The dissolve and ending sequences: room-by-room fade across the facade, camera pullback, fade to black.

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  Source and production logs on GitHub

Credits

Zhanlan: characters, animation, interaction scripting, game architecture. Lisa: scene assembly, materials, lighting, sound integration. Davin: field research and interviews.

Gallery