Table for Two

Two players. One table.

A two-player dining installation. Pac-Man projected onto a table, controlled by physical cutlery via capacitive brass quadrants. Icebreaker questions at every level end.

Client

Collaborative Installation

Year

2026

Industry

Interactive Media

Turnaround time

~5 weeks

The Question

Dining is one of the last common rituals where two people are supposed to look at each other and talk. Most of the time, they don't. Can a game that lives inside the dining ritual, using cutlery as controllers, using the table itself as the screen, pull two strangers into actual conversation?

The Approach

Table for Two turns a real dining table into a two-player controller. The tabletop is divided into four brass capacitive quadrants, one per hand. A projector mounted above throws a modified Pac-Man onto the surface. Moving your fork or your hand across a quadrant steers your character. Between levels, the game pauses and displays an icebreaker question, the players have to answer before play resumes.

Hardware — ESP32 microcontroller, capacitive touch via brass plates hidden under a tablecloth, projection mapping calibrated to the table surface
Software — Unity, running a modified Pac-Man with custom two-player logic and question deck
Question deck — Written to escalate: light and playful at level 1, personal by level 5, existential by level 10

The Outcome

Shown at the CCI Studio in 2025. Strangers who sat down expecting a game left mid-conversation. The piece became a case study in how much narrative a small system can carry when the interaction ritual is well-chosen.

Built with Borissova, Gong, and Lin as a team of four. My role was the Unity game logic, and the icebreaker question design.