Electri+City
The World of NRG lived online, but what if there was a way to build it physically? Meet Electri+City, a one-of-a-kind 3D interactive table we custom built, housing the same topics and stories as the website. Just... more tangibly.
The first thing we set out to solve was how to actually build the city. Of all the options we found of existing interactive tables, none carried the level of animation we needed to tell stories fluently. Projection tables were too bulky (this needed to be transportable to trade shows), some used built in LEDs to light up different areas which looks cool, but lacks dynamic animation ability. So, we made something up.
After extensive research, we came up with the idea of building a translucent 3D printed city and placing it on top of a screen as the table base, which would allow light to project up into the buildings, and also allow us to animate everything on the city floor. We found a vendor in Malaysia that specialized in building miniature cities, and together with our animation partner Loica, set out to craft it.
A tablet would be attached to the table that would control the animations, and a third screen behind the table on a wall would offer tertiary visuals. Pick a topic and the city responds underneath you. Buildings light up, power runs through the grid, the screen behind it animates in sync.
While the physical table was being built, we worked with Loica to figure out the actual animations underneath the buildings, and Rogue Studio to craft the tablet UI.
I built the entire experience with Claude Code. The first version ran stacked looping video animations underneath the city that responded to actions on the tablet. It worked, but adding anything new meant re-rendering everything. So I re-tooled the entire architecture under the hood, recreating all the animations and geometry in web-friendly CSS and SVG, which let me automate topic animations and make the entire system modular. Adding a new topic or anything else became dramatically simpler, and a lot lighter too.
I built a custom studio app (think Figma meets Illustrator meets Framer) for tracing the city, cleaning up building geometry, placing shadows that move with the sun, and choreographing every animation across all the topics. Traffic runs on real physics. Around 600 cars, each one accelerating and braking based on the car in front of it, signals timing every junction.
Since the table was mobile, we needed a way to push updates remotely. So I wrapped it all inside a proper macOS app that updates itself whenever I ship something new.
Nobody asked for Electri+City. But everywhere it goes, it consistently stops people in their tracks.