α-Forest

α-Forest is a multi-sensory healing experience built for U-108 Space, the circular immersive room at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung, where it ran from January to April 2025. Up to six visitors sit inside it wearing EEG headsets. What surrounds them — the wall, the floor, the sound — is driven by what their own brains are doing.

A visitor sitting cross-legged in a circular projection room, hands resting on a floor covered in radiating white filaments, the curved wall filled with soft orange and teal cloud forms — U-108 Space. The floor pattern spreads from where the visitor's hands rest.

Where the forest came from

The source material is a real one. In March 2024 we shot the Xitou experimental forest in Nantou, Taiwan — stills and 360° captures — and that footage became the ground the generated imagery is grown from, rather than the piece inventing a forest from nothing.

Looking up through a dense canopy of cedar and broadleaf trees toward pale sky, shot from the forest floor — Xitou experimental forest, Nantou, March 2024.

The system

Six Muse headsets stream EEG over a single BLED112 bridge. Three Kinects on three mini PCs cover the floor for body tracking, with an IR camera for the parts the depth sensors miss. Everything lands in TouchDesigner on the control machine, which runs StreamDiffusion in the loop and sends finished frames out over NDI as two separate feeds — one for the wall, one for the floor — while a dedicated audio machine handles the sound.

The room is split across two levels: visitors on the first floor, the control desk on the second, out of sight.

Design render of the circular room: a ring of low seats on a dark floor, each with a coloured halo of light around it, against a deep blue curved wall — Layout study. Each seat gets its own patch of floor, responding to the person in it.

Credits

With Timothy Wood and Olifa Ching-Ying Hsieh. Commissioned by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts through the U-108 Space commission programme.