Meow Wolf Omega Mart XR Beauty Salon

Omega Mart XR Beauty Salon (2019)
Mixed Reality Interactive Installation
Meow Wolf, Las Vegas
Permanent Exhibition

The Omega Mart Beauty Parlor is a mixed reality interactive make up counter located inside of Meow Wolf’s Las Vegas location Omega Mart. As visitors approach the counter, they become aware of nine illuminated make up compacts located below a mirror. As they touch each compact, a different digital make up “look” is magically applied to their reflection in the mirror.

The face mask program uses facial recognition to map a 2D image to the contours of the face, making adjustments to the mask in real-time to match expressions and facial movements. The recognition and masking program can handle groups of five or more people at the same time. The looks were inspired by special effects makeup, aliens, mermaids, club kids and drag kings n’ queens.

The program uses openCV 4 and DLIB in Python 3 for facial recognition and face mask, GLSL shader texture sharing over Spout, capacitive touch sensor processing via Arduino / Teensy, reactive embedded lighting using sACN, w/ troubleshooting GUI and communication handled between programs via TouchDesigner. I was lead artist with Brandt Peters on this project and did the programming for the face mask, lighting, and sensors as well as artwork for each of the nine looks.