Joshua Kaplan
© Joshua Kaplan

Space Bridge

Toolkit and Experiences

— PROJECT NAME

Space Bridge Experiences


— ROLE

Programming

Design

Toolkit Dev


— DATE

May – August 2026

The Space Bridge is a location based entertainment platform on the fifth floor of the Entertainment Technology Center in Pittsburgh, taking up the majority of the hallway. It’s one of the first things ETC students and guests encounter.


I was hired over the summer to create a set of interactive experiences for tours and guests, and to make the Space Bridge into a viable rapid development platform through the creation of a toolkit.

Each side of the Space Bridge has three TVs, a touch screen, three sets of six buttons and LEDs, three RFID readers, a joystick, two trackballs, speakers, and DMX lighting. My toolkit handles the configuration of all of this in an event-based way.


Because of its prominent location, several groups have differing needs for the platform. It needs to be able to welcome guests, serve as an information platform, provide passive background content to give life to the hallway without disrupting anyone’s work, be usable as a development platform for students, and be quickly configurable by administrators.


I created several “modes” to help achieve this. In “Admin Mode”, administrators can tap a keycard to configure the bridge. In “Welcome Mode”, a configurable welcome message is displayed for guests. In “Viewport Mode”, a people can choose to play any of the content experiences we developed, and easily add more to the list.


To allow content to be added easily without rebuilding, and to enable virtual blast doors to close for transitions, the system is built using Unity’s Additive Scene Loading and Addressables.

Viewport

The Viewport serves as a fidget toy for people walking by, a tester for the input devices, and an experience selector

Welcome

A passive welcome screen is displayed for tour groups, guests, and incoming students. The message is configurable through the Admin panel or config file.

Admin

Space Bridge Administrators can tap their keycards to shut down any active experience and open Admin Mode. From here, they can change lighting, adjust the welcome message, or change modes

Prototypes of the Space Bridge Admin Keycard. These are RFID cards printing on using a UV printer.

Floating TV

In this mini experience, a virtual TV drifts across the screens of the Space Bridge, playing clips from old space movies.

Quasi Screen Cleaning

In this mini experience, Quasi, a robot created by a former ETC team, drifts across the screen squeegee-ing splats. Guests can press buttons to cause more splats to appear. At the end, Quasi will happily, sadly, or angrily fly away based on how the cleaning went.

Flying Through Space

In this mini experience, the Space Bridge flies through a set of space scenes. Flying into a warp portal causes the ship to enter warp mode, where the old space scene unloads and the new one loads in.

Another scene in the “flying through space” sequence