Rangnam Loy Krathong

A Loy Krathong you walk into. For the 2024 festival the City of Bangkok and King Power turned Santiphap Park into a single connected experience — part treasure hunt, part craft table, part light show on the water. Open the web app and the park becomes a trail: walk it, and at each stop your phone hands you a different krathong to collect. Trade what you gather for a paper krathong, colour it by hand, and scan it back in — and your krathong appears, projection-mapped, on the real surface of the river, floating among everyone else's. It keeps the ritual of Loy Krathong intact — make a krathong, set it on the water, make a wish — and rebuilds every step of it with light.

Walk, collect, colour, float. It opens with no download — you register straight in the web app and start walking. The park is laid out as a location-based AR trail: reach a point and a krathong materialises through your phone camera to be collected, and every point gives a different one, so the route itself is the reward. Each krathong you collect can be exchanged for a physical colouring sheet — and walking the whole trail unlocks the full set, so the more you explore the more designs you can choose from. You colour your paper krathong by hand at the craft station, then scan it; the app reads your artwork, and out on the river you pick exactly where to set it down. A moment later it's there — your hand-coloured krathong, drifting on the real water under the projectors.

The magic trick is the river itself. Beneath the surface of the water at Santiphap, a mesh screen was laid out and lit by more than three projectors angled down onto it — so what looks like krathongs floating on the river is really a projection landing on the actual water. When a visitor scans their hand-coloured krathong and chooses a spot, it appears there in real time, sitting alongside every other krathong already on the surface; the whole crowd's work builds into one drifting field of light. The play screen and the projection mapping — the hardest, most physical part of the build — were created in TouchDesigner by CHAYANON, while the web app and realtime backend fed it a live stream of who'd floated what, and where.

What makes it land is that nothing about the ritual is faked away. You still walk to find your krathong, you still colour it yourself, you still choose where it goes on the water and watch it drift — the technology sits underneath, carrying the parts that couldn't scale otherwise. Built under 27JUNE Studio, with the river screen and projection mapping by CHAYANON in TouchDesigner, it stitched a location-based AR hunt, a physical craft station and a live projection-mapped river into a single loop — so a hundred people could each make one krathong, by hand, and see it floating on the real river of Santiphap Park.