Refract designs large-scale generative installations — rooms that respond to the people inside them. Every piece here started as a line of shader code before it became a room you can walk into.
Most studios treat software as a means to an end — a way to drive a projector or trigger a sensor. We treat it as the actual medium, the way a sculptor treats bronze. The shader that drives a piece is designed alongside the room, not bolted on after the architecture is fixed.
That means every installation ships with its own custom renderer, tuned to the specific space, the specific light conditions, the specific way people are expected to move through it.
Four slow-sweeping light shafts move through a fogged chamber, their density built from layered noise so the beams read as physical volume, not a flat gradient. Visitors' shadows interrupt the beams in real time.
A ring of light responds to a live five-oscillator drone, each bar mapped to a frequency band. Press play to hear the piece the visualization is actually reading.
One hundred and forty independent agents follow only local rules — separation, alignment, cohesion — with no central choreography. The flocking behavior in this preview is the same simulation running in the gallery.
Every piece is designed against the actual architecture, light, and foot traffic — never a generic loop dropped into a space.
Custom shader and simulation code for each installation, tuned for the hardware it will actually run on.
A projector and a fog machine in our own bay before anything ships — nothing is approved from a laptop screen.
Touring pieces get built to survive load-in and load-out sixty times, not just opening night.
"They understood our ceiling height was the actual constraint, not a footnote. The piece was designed around it from day one."
"Six weeks from first call to load-in, and the render was still running flawlessly eight months into the tour."
"Most vendors show you a demo reel. Refract showed us the actual shader and explained why it would hold up on our GPUs."
Most projects start as a single conversation about the room, not the technology.
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