AR realistic snow that you can place on any environment.
I love it when it snows. I think it’s a universal reaction to point out that it’s snowing during the first snow fall. I choose the out doors as my location and did research about particle systems in order to find/make realistic snow. I initially wanted to play with this idea of AR snow in the future because global warming has gotten to the point of no return. And who knows maybe we will only be able to experience snow through AR in the future. However, for my video I wanted to convey the excitement of the first snow fall. If I had more time and expertise, I’d want to create an app that could change into all kinds of different weather environments.
This is a project that Emily and I made in collaboration. Our project is an AR penguin that follows you around.
In our project, the penguin is a source of comfort for the user in environments like elementary school where the user may be away from their family for the first time and need extra support. Since the penguin is the user’s imaginary friend, the user is also the site which the penguin follows. To create our project, we generated a random circular path for the penguin to travel in the proximity of the user that updates so that it stays in the proximity of the user when they move from place to place. The penguin follows the user with different animations based on how fast the user is traveling. In the future, we would like to expand on the penguin character by having it respond to time of day and weather.
For my AR sculpture, I created AR Panther Beach, an app which augments Panther Beach in California to any detectable surface. Constantly looking back at my memories, I miss the relaxing and chill days I spent in the previous summers going to the beach with my friends in pre-covid times.
I tried capturing the essence of the summer beach days, creating the terrain of the beach from scratch, adding Palm Trees which unfortunately do not exist there, and augmented spinning bottles of Soju (non-alcoholic of course) and a captured video of my friends dancing during our last time at Panther Beach, displayed onto a screen and played on a loop. I wanted to begin the AR experience in front of an open door, a sort of welcoming entrance to paradise. I added wind into the Terrain, which allowed for the Palm Tree prefabs to sway and shift gorgeously with the wind. Since my project uses plane-detection from Hello AR, tapping the screen allows you to move the beach terrain onto a different surface.
Overall I had an extremely fun and great experience making this project. I wanted to make it a little personal, since I feel that my other projects lacked that. I really wanted to add specific elements to distinguish my beach experience from an ordinary beach so that this AR app would feel more meaningful and allow me to reminisce on the good old days.
As Christmas is approaching, and with Rona still present with us, I imagine many people will be isolated from their families, thus losing the festive spirit that we indeed need more than ever before.
The most iconic presence in December would be the Christmas trees and the beautiful gift boxes under the trees. It is a sign of love and unity within the household, thus I created this app for people to virtually experience and design their little Christmas space through augmented reality.
For me, I am personally super fascinated with augmented reality, and I see great potential in enabling people to see something that is not actually there as a method to provoke certain emotions. Even though the idea behind this app is warm-hearted and full of love, but I decided to shoot the documentation video with some dark humor of preparing for this Christmas "party" diligently, and only later to be revealed that the whole event is designing this corner with Christmas items virtually. This was inspired by the feelings I have when I put on make up and nice clothes for Zoom classes.
Overall, I struggled a lot through this assignment because I started and attempted to implement a completely different idea, which is as Golan has said, way too difficult for me. It sort of consumed all of my energy, but this idea came across my mind within time (whew), so I am pretty glad with how it turned out given the time I had (my own fault for overestimating my technical abilities :''D).
Here, I intend the video to be played in a loop to convey that repetition of how I move around the house every day.
The video may seem too short to convey an entire day, but that is exactly how I feel about each day. Every day is fleeting, yet every day has become a viciously, unmotivating cycle. Doing the same things every day isolated from online school makes me unwilling to push myself to work sometimes. Despite this feeling, I wanted to utilize these coins that track my movement/tasks to somehow reward myself for even getting up out of bed and trying my best to do the things I need to do and want. I place each coin for things I must do in the day and things I feel are so easy, yet hard to get myself doing.
For this project I focused mostly on the story of the AR, using JustALine as a prop for a larger overarching story.
Reflecting on this project:
Today is one of the most important holidays for Colombian Catholics, it is a national holiday that ultimately marks the start of the Christmas season. I grew up Catholic in Colombia from a family that is ethnically complex, in terms of religion and racial background(but that is a can of worms that I don’t think ill be touching for a while). For that reason, religion has been something that I am really cognizant of, not so much because of the actual religious practice and believes but the elements of tradition and culture that radiate from it.
I changed my location on Twitter to the city I grew up in Colombia, in part as a performance and in part as a way to connecting back to that community. One of the most interesting things to see is the way many teenagers interact with our traditional holidays after growing up in English-speaking platforms, as such I saw many girls point out the inherent mysticism and magic of candle lighting. In a way, approaching the weird intersection of the hyper traditional space Catholicism lives in, and modern internet subcultures live in. This lead me to start thinking a lot about the bizarre aspects of my childhood and the beliefs that I held, growing up in a country living through the silent waves of a civil war.
This video was a way to reconnect to some of those experiences from my childhood that sort of came back to interact with me as an almost-adult.
AR realistic snow that you can place on any environment.
