Drink Rink is a six-foot long interactive bar that uses camera vision to detect drink koozies and hands on the surface and translates them into playable game pieces that can be used in several mini-games developed specifically for the bar.

Drink Rink first debuted at Low-Level Festival in 2016 and made its second public showing at the Dreamhouse in 2018. The cabinet was fabricated by Mark Kleback and the games and technology were developed by Andy Wallace and Anthony Marefat. Martha Moszczynski did the art on the outside of the bar and Chris Hernandez did the graphic design for some of the games.

The Cabinet

Drink Rink was conceptualized during Mark's first semester at ITP and shown at the 2011 ITP Winter Show as a prototype. This version used one camera to detect TUIO tags on the bottoms of drink koozies and relayed the information to a Processing sketch.

In 2015, DBA Arcade decided to revisit this project and rebuild not only the bar itself, but the software using openFrameWorks instead of Processing. Andy Wallace and Anthony Marefat came on to help with game design and software calibration while Mark spearheaded much of the physical build.

The size of the new bar necessitated two cameras instead of one. After a few months of troubleshooting, the ideal cameras turned out to be PS3 Eye cameras with custom lenses by Peau Productions. Using two BenQ projects and a 45-degree angled mirror, the image from the computer was able to stretch across the 6 feet of the bar surface. The TUIO tags were slightly hard to read, and were updated to AR Codes, which had harder angles and were easier to read in the software. These were laser etched into acrylic and glued to the bottom of custom drink koozies that were branded with the Drink Rink logo.