TouchDesigner Developers in the UK

What we covered in the talk

The presentation walks through our two Puma Arcade builds in North America: New York in 2023, then a significant expansion across three floors of the Las Vegas flagship in 2024, delivered in ten months. Both are driven entirely by TouchDesigner and Unreal Engine, two systems we treat as a pair because they belong together: real-time rendering lives in Unreal where it makes sense, while Touch runs the sensors, lighting, data and operations behind the scenes.

Data and personalisation

Retail experiences get better when the store remembers you. Each gameplay session captures a short name, a score and a series of images, generates a unique QR code, and links to a microsite where players claim an animated GIF of their game. Scan the same code on a return visit and the store welcomes you back with your previous scores. Under the hood: a Postgres database driven from TouchDesigner through the Psycopg library, per-player UUIDs, and WebSockets to and from the microsite. Our tip from the talk: data equals database. Skip the CSVs and go straight to Postgres.

Bridging two engines

Every signal in the building crosses between the two systems: centralised Art-Net lighting driven from Touch, Unreal screen content with OSC back into Touch so lighting states react to players, webcams bridged into Unreal over NDI, QR scanners and joysticks over serial, and arcade machines running both engines on one physical box with carefully tested resource management. One hard-won lesson: local networks struggle with many NDI channels, so we composited every media layer and in-game advert onto a single NDI channel with carefully built UV maps. NDI also hides Unreal level-loading stutter behind a unified UI layer.

Keeping it alive

For us TouchDesigner isn’t just content creation, it keeps the whole system running. A Touch watchdog monitors machine health across twelve machines, restarts a crashed Unreal instance within seconds, emails the team when anything happens, and even watches itself. NDI camera feeds flow into a central monitoring system in London, with hidden diagnostic screens for remote access and TCP/IP-controlled power throughout. The result runs sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, with no technical staff on site.

Test before the building exists

We build every space in VR first and test with the real sensors, three Orbbec units and point-cloud slicing in GLSL to detect ball strikes on an LED wall, long before the venue is ready. For Las Vegas that meant a physical replica in our studio and seven months of testing before the site existed. Physical testing is the ultimate key: when a system has to work around the clock in public, you cannot leave it to chance.