Client: Changi Airport Group. Year: 2024. Produced through: CraveFX.
A guided kiosk experience where visitors author their vision of Terminal 5 by selecting three lifestyle priorities, generating a personalised output and shareable QR takeaway.
The question
How do you turn a complex infrastructure story into something visitors can meaningfully participate in within a short dwell-time setting? The experience needed to feel personal and expressive, work reliably at high throughput, and connect cleanly to a larger multi-screen installation. It also had to produce a satisfying takeaway whether or not a visitor chose to take a photo.
The approach
We framed the interaction as a simple authorship model: visitors choose exactly three icons from eight lifestyle themes to define their "T5 of the future." The interface is built around a clear, constrained decision set that stays approachable for all ages, while the underlying system remains deterministic and production-safe.
Selections are visualised in a 3D character-led scene, where chosen icons populate dynamic mini-bubbles in real time. After selection, the kiosk reveals a popularity view that scales all icons by live percentages, using collision-based layout behaviour so the data feels animated and alive rather than static.
To extend the experience beyond the kiosk, we designed a clean handoff to the large screen system via TCP messaging. The payload includes the three selected category IDs and kiosk identity, allowing the installation to react contextually while keeping the kiosk interaction fast and self-contained.
For the optional photo moment, we implemented an end-to-end capture and compositing pipeline. A timed capture feeds a segmentation stage using YOLO with SAM2 to extract the visitor cleanly, then an off-screen camera generates a set of 4:3 outputs including one personalised composition driven by a lookup table, plus three curated defaults. All images upload via API to a microsite that returns a QR code for immediate download and sharing, followed by an automated reset and session control to maintain throughput.
Reflection
This proved that public-facing interactivity can be both expressive and operationally robust. By keeping the front-end interaction simple and the back-end pipeline deliberate, visitors get a sense of authorship, the installation stays stable under real throughput, and the experience carries forward through a shareable artifact. The result is an interaction that feels personal on the surface, while remaining carefully engineered underneath.