The Project
One of the exam projects for the second and last school year in SSSAA Lugano, consisted in a co-creation project with MASI Lugano.
The class was split in two groups and asked to design and create two Augmented Reality experiences for a two-week event to be held in a permanent gallery.
The Gallery - Sentimento e Osservazione
The gallery is a permanent, exhibiting paintings relating to Tessin during the period 1850-1950
We focused on creating AR experiences on 5 specific paintings.
These paintings were advised to us by the client during one of the co-creation meetings we held, due to their interesting visual nature and relevance to the gallery.
The Application
Our group decided to design the application around the following points
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Ease of use
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Immediacy of fruition
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Respect of the painter's intention
The AR team which I was part of designed different experiences and mechanics for each painting, to really bring each one to life.
Augmented captions for each painting
XRay and UV vision for "Funerale Bianco"
Stencil masked 3D environment for "Canto dell'Aurora"
3D Animation for "Sera sull'Alpe
Stencil masked environment for "L'uomo nel vigneto"
Gamified informative creation of the painting for "Variation: Gewitterstimmung"
The Technologies
I personally took care of managing the Unity project and coding the app's functionalities.
Of course we needed a lot of different mechanics.
Stencil Mask
Stencil Masking is a shader technique useful for hiding objects in plain sight.
We aimed to create the feeling of moving dioramas in the pictures frames.
Culling Layers
By using Culling Layers, I managed to play pre-rendered animations over the device's camera.
This has been used over the "Funerale Bianco" painting, to visualize the XRay and UV scans provided to us by MASI. This visualization helps explain their use and the information gathered to the visitor.
Video to Texture Projection
We used this technique to project the previously hand-crafted sunset transition on the 3D model of the "Sera sull'Alpe" painting, along with a 3D animation of a sun setting behind the mountain range.
