Week 05 | Tools & Technology #1 | TouchDesigner Basics

Monday, February 2, 2026

Room 3420 (Marsio)

This week, we are going to dive into the tools and technology we have available for actually creating embodied experiences.

Using TouchDesigner with the Aalto licenses #

You can download and use the non-commercial version on your own computer, but I would highly recommend working on the Aalto computers. We have a total 20 educational licenses available. The license is allocated to you when you launch the software. It is not possible to get the Aalto license on your own computer.

Sometimes the license manager does not work and it cannot connect to the the server. In those cases, it seems that restarting the computer usually seems to fix the issue.

Using the physical computers at Väre #

These classrooms have TouchDesigner installed. You can use any of them when there is space.

• Marsio, 3420 Computer classroom in Marsio.
• Marsio, Experimental Studio 3430 We have theee computers in the Experimental Studio available for working on your projects.
• Marsio, Extended Reality Studio 3401. The XR Studio can also be used when it’s free.
• Väre, Room L208 (This room is booked for us during most of the classes. Not a great GPU but will do the trick for most cases.)
• Väre, Room K103 (RTX 3080 GPUs)
• Väre, Media Lab Homebase We also have some computers in the Media Lab Homebase rooms. Specifications differ from computer to computer. The best GPU is in room O102.

Using vdi.aalto.fi to connect to the Aalto computers remotely #

Log in to vdi.aalto.fi with your Aalto account and choose any of the rooms listed above and you should have access to a computer with TD installed.

This actually works really well and it’s very convenient! Can be used with a low-power machine like a laptop with much better performance. Also great for using on your Mac to access some of the Windows-only features.