The UBC Alumni Wall: Rebuilding a Landmark Campus Experience for the Next Decade

Client: University of British Columbia (UBC) Alumni Association, Robert H. Lee Alumni Centre Industry: Higher Education / Alumni Engagement / Campus Experience Services: Interactive Wall Design & Development, Full Codebase Rebuild, Custom Hardware Integration, Headless CMS Architecture, Data Visualization Technologies: Three.js (Interaction Physics), Pocketbase (Headless CMS), Docker, React, Infrared Multi-Touch Bezel (30-point), Automated Database Synchronization Tags: Interactive Experiential, Enterprise Solutions, Education, Data Visualization, Custom Hardware

Summary

When UBC's Robert H. Lee Alumni Centre needed a landmark interactive wall to welcome alumni, students, and visitors, Intergalactic built an experience so central to campus life that graduates say convocation doesn't feel official until they've found their name on it. In 2026, we rebuilt the entire system from the ground up — modernizing the codebase to set the wall up for its next decade of service, engineering a custom-fabricated, seismic-code-compliant rail system for five portrait monitors, and surprising UBC's leadership with a cherry-blossom particle system inspired by the campus itself. The result: three-to-four-person deep lineups on graduation day, requests from other universities, and a wall built to keep running for another decade. Read on to see how we turned a piece of architecture into an emotional touchpoint for tens of thousands of alumni — or get in touch if your institution needs an experience people line up for.

The Challenge

When UBC set out to build its new Alumni Centre in the Robert H. Lee building — designed to double as a Welcome Centre for the entire campus — the architects envisioned an interactive wall as a centerpiece of the main lobby. It needed to do a lot at once: welcome returning alumni, greet new and returning students, orient campus visitors, and serve as a living showcase of UBC's history, achievements, and community.

Intergalactic built the original Alumni Wall in 2015 to meet that brief — focused on alumni recognition, a browsable timeline of university history, live data and statistics about UBC, and windows into campus events and research. The wall became something more than a piece of architecture: alumni returning for convocation would rush to it after their ceremony to find their name, and many said graduation didn't feel fully official until they'd seen themselves on the wall and had their photo taken beside it.

But by the mid-2020s, the original 2015 codebase was reaching the limits of its useful life. Built on a decade-old technology stack, it was becoming harder to maintain and extend, and it wasn't taking advantage of newer capabilities — like more refined interaction physics — that had since become possible. UBC needed a rebuild that preserved everything alumni had come to love about the wall while modernizing its foundations for long-term maintainability and setting it up to keep running reliably for the next decade — and it needed to happen without replacing the existing hardware footprint, inside a physical cavity with real architectural and seismic constraints. Graduation days, when clusters of new alumni and their families gather around the wall at once, presented a particularly demanding real-world test case worth designing around.

The Approach

Rather than patch the aging 2015 codebase, Intergalactic made the call to rebuild the Alumni Wall from scratch — informed by lessons from the original system, but built entirely on modern foundations. The team containerized the new build with Docker, so the experience could run reliably across different hardware and operating systems (including a future move to Linux, if needed), and rebuilt the front end in a modern React framework for long-term maintainability.

Building for the long haul. With a decade-old codebase reaching its natural limits, the team rebuilt the application layer to be leaner and more resilient by design — engineered to run continuously for days without needing a restart. As part of that modernization, the team also introduced a dedicated "graduation mode" to handle the wall's highest-traffic moments: the system now detects and filters out accidental touches — like a sleeve or a shoulder brushing the screen during a photo — so a crowd of celebrating families doesn't inadvertently spawn extra sessions during the exact moments that matter most to graduates.

Engineering the physical build. The Alumni Wall isn't just a screen — it's architecture. It divides the Alumni Centre lobby from a row of offices behind it, and Intergalactic designed and fabricated a custom rail system to house five 55" portrait-oriented monitors that could be pulled out from one side for service while fitting within a cavity only about 30 cm deep. The entire structure had to meet seismic building code requirements. Each monitor sits less than a millimeter behind a protective tempered glass cover, with touch input delivered through an infrared bezel supporting up to 30 simultaneous touch points — engineering built to hold up to years of heavy public use.

Making the experience feel alive. Beyond stability, the team wanted returning visitors to discover something new. Inspired by the cherry blossoms that blanket UBC's real campus each spring, Intergalactic built a seasonal particle system using Three.js — animated cherry blossoms drift and scatter across the interface, with fine-grained control over wind intensity, direction, duration, and particle size and behavior. The wall's signature "gentle repel" interaction physics — which keep users' interface circles from crowding into each other — were also rebuilt for greater efficiency, laying the groundwork for the new particle effects to run smoothly alongside them.

Removing manual bottlenecks. The team also automated what had previously been a manual, error-prone process: syncing alumni records from UBC's database. A scheduled batch synchronization now pulls updates automatically, solving a real operational pain point — UBC routinely updates its graduation rolls right up until the day before convocation, and the new system ensures the wall reflects those last-minute changes without manual intervention.

The Solution

When the wall is idle, it plays a standby sequence of historical UBC imagery with a general invitation to explore. Touching the wall grows a new interface circle into view, offering visitors a choice: search for an alumnus, browse the interactive timeline, explore data visualizations of enrollment trends (through an interactive filterable globe or line graphs), or page through informational slides on UBC's leadership, mandate, and campuses.

Searching for an alum opens an on-screen keyboard where visitors can filter by name, graduation year, faculty, or program. Selecting a record reveals a circular profile showing the alum's name, graduation date, degrees, honors, and student involvement — surrounded by an outer arc of small historical photos drawn from the exact years that alum attended UBC, along with their composite graduation photo where available. Touching the composite photo opens a dedicated navigation and magnification view so alumni can find themselves in the crowd; touching any historical photo jumps straight into the timeline for that year.

The timeline itself is a horizontally scrubbable history of the university, browsable by decade or by individual year, surfacing photo-driven stories — often several per year — that expand into fuller narratives with photos, text, and video.

Behind the scenes, a headless Pocketbase CMS gives the UBC Alumni Association full ownership of content updates year over year, without any dependency on Intergalactic for routine changes. On graduation days, the interface itself doesn't change, but the system introduces three defined "swim lanes" that keep users' interface circles from colliding — protecting graduates in the middle of finding their name and posing for a photo from being accidentally bumped by the person next to them.

The Result

Since the rebuild, the modernized codebase has held up well under real-world use, running for extended stretches without needing a restart — exactly the kind of long-term reliability the project set out to achieve. (The team continues to refine edge cases as they come up, including tuning the infrared touch bezel's sensitivity to stray contact from fabric or hair, using AI-assisted code review to help track down and resolve these situations.)

The new graduation mode had an immediate, visible impact: during spring convocation, the wall drew lineups three to four people deep, with new alumni and their families responding enthusiastically to both the smoother, more resilient experience and the new cherry blossom particle effects. UBC's Alumni Association was so taken with the seasonal particle system — which Intergalactic had built as a surprise — that the team unveiled it without any advance notice at an after-hours staff and university leadership event held in the Alumni Centre lobby. The reaction, by all accounts, was delight.

The project's impact has extended well beyond the Alumni Centre itself. The rebuilt wall has drawn interest and inquiries from other universities, earned industry recognition, and directly led to new work for Intergalactic — including a current donor wall project for BCIT. The UBC Alumni Wall remains in daily operation today, with an expected operational life of another decade, and UBC and Intergalactic continue to discuss future seasonal themes and new features to keep the experience evolving.

Interested in an interactive landmark that becomes part of how people experience your institution? See how we did it or get in touch to talk about your project.