POPS Pinball: Turning Auckland’s Train Station Into a Giant Arcade of Light, Colour and Connection.
Interview by Paul Marshall.
There’s something beautifully rebellious about taking a place where people are usually in a hurry and giving them a reason to stop, look up and play. In a city where commuters are generally focused on getting from A to B, the idea of turning Te Waitematā Station into a giant interactive pinball machine feels like a welcome invitation to rediscover the simple pleasure of having fun.
That’s the thinking behind POPS Pinball, a colourful collision of public art, projection mapping, gaming and human connection that transforms the station’s facade into a living, breathing arcade. Rather than simply presenting art for people to admire from a distance, the project invites them to become part of the spectacle, controlling the action and watching their movements spill across the building in an explosion of light, colour and movement.
As part of Auckland’s We The Young festival, the project brings together the creative imagination of Vesica, the technical expertise of Perceptual Engineering and the possibilities of large-scale interactive art. To find out how this ambitious idea came together, I caught up with Anthony Van Dorsten to talk about the inspiration, the technology and the bigger idea behind creating moments of unexpected joy in public spaces.
From a passing idea to a city-sized pinball machine
Every memorable creative project begins somewhere. Sometimes it’s a sketch on a piece of paper; sometimes it’s a conversation that takes an unexpected turn. In the case of POPS Pinball, it began with a simple question: what if a familiar public space could become something completely different?
“The seed came from Ant, Vesica’s founder and director,” Anthony explains, describing how the concept developed through conversations with their collaborators at Perceptual Engineering. “Underneath it all was a simple want: to drop a bit of play and some unexpected joy into the middle of the city.”
The initial opportunity came through Auckland Live, which approached the team about creating a projection-mapping installation for Te Waitematā Station. With the station’s facade providing a monumental canvas and We The Young offering the perfect festival setting, the creative challenge was to find an idea that could appeal to different generations.
The answer was hiding in plain sight.
“We wanted something interactive that young and old could get stuck into,” Anthony says. “An arcade game hit the mark straight away.”
There’s an obvious appeal in that idea. For those of us who remember the golden age of video arcades, pinball machines evoke memories of flashing lights, frantic reflexes, high scores and the unmistakable satisfaction of keeping a silver ball in play for just a few seconds longer. For younger audiences raised on online gaming, the experience offers something altogether different: the chance to step away from a screen and play a game that occupies an entire building.
The team explored several possibilities, including Pac-Man and Pong, before settling on pinball. It was a choice that combined familiarity with spectacle, taking a classic gaming concept and giving it a scale that would have been unimaginable in the arcades of old.
Forget squeezing around a machine in a dark corner. Here, the playing field is a city landmark.
The POPS universe gets a bigger playground
POPS Pinball didn’t emerge in isolation. Its visual DNA can be traced back to Vesica’s POPS! artwork in Aotea Square, another part of the wider We The Young festival programme.
The original concept had already established a distinctive visual identity, built around bold colours, playful characters and an immediately recognisable aesthetic. The team had also considered how that visual world might extend beyond a single installation, spreading through the city via empty shopfronts, wrapped lampposts and smaller satellite activations.
The ambition was to make the city itself feel like part of the artwork.
“POPS had a strong visual language and a bold colour palette, and we wanted to push it further out into the city,” Anthony explains.
The characters were already connecting with younger audiences, and their rounded heads provided an unexpected creative advantage. As Anthony points out, they were practically pinballs already.
Sometimes the best ideas are the ones that seem obvious only after somebody has thought of them.
By carrying those familiar characters into a playable environment, POPS Pinball extends the original artwork rather than simply reproducing it on a larger surface. The characters become part of an experience in which the audience can influence what happens next.
That distinction is important. This isn't just about making art bigger. It's about making it more immediate, more personal and more playful.
Two creative minds, one shared vision
Behind the installation is a collaborative creative process that brings together ideas, refinement and visual storytelling.
Anthony describes a working relationship in which Ant is generally the originator of ideas, while Nick acts as the sounding board, challenging concepts and helping turn them into something practical. From there, the pair develop the project's overall look and feel together.
It's a familiar dynamic in creative partnerships: one person throws open the possibilities, another tests the boundaries, and the finished work emerges from the exchange.
Yet there's an interesting twist. According to Anthony, the two are often so closely aligned that they arrive at the studio having independently experienced the same creative breakthrough overnight.
For a project that relies on multiple disciplines working together, that shared instinct is invaluable. A concept like POPS Pinball needs to function simultaneously as an artwork, a game, a public attraction and a technical installation. The creative vision has to be strong enough to bring all those elements together without allowing any one of them to overwhelm the others.
When the audience becomes the artist
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of POPS Pinball is what happens when the traditional relationship between artwork and audience is turned on its head.
In a gallery, we generally look at art. In a public installation, we might walk around it, photograph it or discuss it with friends. With POPS Pinball, the audience gets to influence the artwork itself.
“Once you're playing, you're not just looking at the art, you're helping make it,” Anthony says.
Every game unfolds differently, creating its own combination of light, colour and movement across the station's facade. The building becomes a constantly changing canvas, responding to the actions of the people operating the game.
It's an ingenious way to make large-scale projection feel personal. Although the installation is physically enormous, the experience belongs to the individual player in that particular moment.
The person pressing the controls isn't merely triggering a pre-programmed spectacle. They're helping determine what the audience sees.
And because each game produces a different result, the installation never quite repeats itself. The artwork becomes a series of fleeting performances, each shaped by the people who step forward to play.
For those watching from the sidelines, that creates another layer of entertainment. You don't necessarily have to take control of the game to become part of the occasion. You can cheer, observe, laugh at a near miss or wait for your turn.
The result is public art that doesn't demand silence or solemn contemplation. It encourages participation, experimentation and the occasional competitive streak.
The unexpected magic of playing with strangers
There's another dimension to POPS Pinball that reaches beyond gaming and visual spectacle: the possibility of bringing people together.
The team deliberately built social interaction into the concept. The game was originally envisioned as a two-player experience, but the controls evolved to create opportunities for more people to join in, including those who might never otherwise have spoken to one another.
“Shared experiences are huge for connection and wellbeing,” Anthony says. “We wanted to create little shared moments of joy, whether you're with friends and family or someone you've never met.”
It's a simple idea, but one with real resonance.
Public spaces are full of people sharing the same physical environment while remaining entirely separate from one another. We pass strangers on footpaths, sit beside them on trains and stand in queues without exchanging more than the occasional glance.
An interactive installation can change that dynamic, even if only briefly. Suddenly, there's a common objective. Someone makes a move, another person reacts, and before long a small crowd is sharing the same moment.
You don't need to know someone's name, occupation or musical tastes to enjoy a good game together. The shared experience does the work.
That sense of spontaneous connection feels particularly relevant in a world where so much entertainment is consumed individually through phones, computers and headphones. POPS Pinball offers something tangible: people gathering around a real-world experience, responding to one another and creating memories in the same place.
It's entertainment with a social purpose, without needing to announce itself as such.
Technology should serve the experience
Of course, creating a giant interactive pinball machine on the facade of a major transport hub requires considerably more than a good idea and a colourful palette.
Behind the apparent simplicity sits a complicated network of moving parts. Physical controls must register player movements, the playback system must respond appropriately, and the projector must translate the game's action onto the building. Multiple systems need to work together smoothly enough that the audience can forget they're even there.
For Anthony, however, the technology is never the main event.
“The experience comes first, every time,” he says.
A large projection onto Te Waitematā Station would have been impressive in its own right. But the team wanted to draw people inside the game's world, making them active participants rather than passive observers.
That meant ensuring the technical infrastructure supported the experience instead of competing with it.
It's a useful reminder for anyone working at the intersection of art and technology. Innovation doesn't necessarily mean showing people how clever the technology is. Sometimes it means using sophisticated systems to create something that feels completely natural.
When POPS Pinball works as intended, nobody needs to understand the engineering behind the projection or the mechanics of the playback system. They simply need to feel that their actions are making something happen.
“The real magic is the two together,” Anthony explains, referring to the technology that builds the experience and the people who bring it to life.
It's a balance that separates an impressive technical demonstration from an engaging public experience.
Measuring success in smiles, conversations and high scores
So how do you measure the success of a project like POPS Pinball once the lights go out and the festival moves on?
You could count the number of people who play, measure audience engagement or track how long visitors spend at the installation. Those figures might tell part of the story, but they don't necessarily capture what makes an experience memorable.
For Anthony, success is reflected in the reactions along the way: the conversations with people watching the installation take shape, the excitement of children discovering the characters, and the spontaneous groups of people who stumble across the game during a night out and decide to chase a high score.
“From the chats during the install with people old and young getting excited about it, to folks stumbling across it on a night out and trying to crack a high score,” he says, “the reactions, the conversations and those moments of joy are what it's all about.”
Ultimately, the ambition is to change how people experience public space. Rather than seeing the city purely as somewhere to travel through, the team wants people to discover places where they can pause, participate and make unexpected memories.
“If we can create memorable experiences that get people excited about public space and keep them coming back, that's success for us.”
It's a fitting philosophy for a project that takes something as ordinary as a train station and turns it into an extraordinary playground.
Final thoughts
POPS Pinball is a reminder that public art doesn't have to be something we simply admire from a distance. It can be something we touch, influence, share and remember.
What makes the project interesting isn't just the scale of the projection or the technical challenge of transforming Te Waitematā Station into a playable arcade. It's the thinking behind it: the belief that creativity can make everyday environments more welcoming, that technology can bring people together, and that a little unexpected fun can change the way we feel about a place.
There is also something rather wonderful about taking a classic game associated with flashing arcade cabinets and giving it an entire city facade to play across. The nostalgia is there for older generations, the novelty is there for younger audiences, and the opportunity for genuine human interaction gives the whole thing a purpose beyond entertainment.
In a city that often seems determined to keep everyone moving, POPS Pinball offers a different proposition.
Stop for a moment. Look up. Have a go. Maybe challenge a stranger to a game.
And remember that sometimes the most meaningful creative experiences aren't the ones that ask us to stand back and admire. They're the ones that invite us to step forward and become part of the picture.
POPS Pinball turns a building into a game, but its real achievement may be turning a crowd of strangers into a community, one playful moment at a time.