Hart van Gent
Internet of Things
May ‘26
Hart van Gent is an interactive public installation for the parks of Ghent, where visitors grow a shared virtual tree with their heartbeat. A visitor places both hands on a totem, which measures their heart rate for about eight seconds while LED strips and vibration motors respond to it. The measurement appears on a vertical screen, where a 3D tree grows in proportion to the heartbeat. Every park has its own tree, so visitors can see how their park compares with the others and build up some local pride. The installation combines a custom Arduino sensor setup, a laser-cut totem and a React Three Fiber and Blender frontend, and turns a simple biometric signal into a collective expression of presence.
Challenge
Most of the challenges came from getting the hardware to measure a heartbeat reliably. The heart rate sensor only returned raw values that had to be converted to beats per minute, and it kept sending data even when nobody was touching it. A pressure sensor, added so a session only starts when a hand is present, gave false readings once it was clamped inside the housing, so it was replaced by a touch sensor. The physical design needed several rounds as well. The first totem was too large and its top surface was too steep, which felt unnatural for resting your hands and made it harder for smaller users to reach. After testing, the totem was redesigned in a more compact form with a gentler angle, and the hand shapes were re-cut in plexiglass so the surface stays flat and works for different hand sizes.