| Project Goal
Commissioned by the Shanghai International Art Festival, we collaborated with artist Zhenhua Xiang to transform his work into an interactive installation.

| Project Outcome
A public interactive installation incorporating elements from the artistt's representative work, creating an experience where audience could generate their own smiling face by interacting with the floating pieces in the 3D space.

Exhibition 
Shanghai Library, Multiple Shopping Malls in Shanghai, 2022 - 2023

Role
Ideation + Unity development, in collaboration with Tian Qin

Toolkit
Blender | Unity | C# | Kinect

Below are some face model examples from the artist, generated through Mid-journey. The concept is to understand the concept of "human self-portrait" from the perspective of artificial intelligence, integrating different facets to deepen human understanding of self-portrait.

Our main goal is to explore the possibility of having audience interacting with the original artwork in an innovate way. After brainstorming, we set an agreement with the artist that it would be great to have a “personalized effect” for each audience. To realize this, we want to disrupt all the blocks of models that make up the face (various irregular geometries) and then randomly select models to reorganize when a viewer approaches/looks at the piece.


      

The main technical difficulty of the project was to realize the spreading and clustering effects for different components of the face model.  The blaster -> gather -> reorder effect was realized through programming in Unity.

Regarding user interaction, we experimented with two input methods. Arduino was firstly tried since there's matured serial communication method in between it and Unity. Below is the test documentation. However, due to the sensor's instability, we switched to Kinect which worked perfectly as part of the final installation.