Credits: Han Shen, Nolan Loh, Muhammed Bahcetepe, Andrew Watson, Mathew Klump, Kevin Goldstein, Austin Gehman, Jiajing Xie, Weiqi Chu, SAID 2013 Fall 2016 Architecture and Interior Design Students at the University of Cincinnati, SAID.
This work is sponsored by the AHSS Third Century Foundation Research Grant at the University of Cincinnati http://bit.ly/2rwXK8I.
Background
Today, as a paradigm shift, headmounted displays (HMD) such as Google Glass, Microsoft HoloLens, both forms of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), are being reintroduced as mixed reality (MR) instruments into the art installation. MR has provided artists and designers with the technologies that allow the audience to interact with and experience the physical and virtual world simultaneously in an immersive environment. In a 1995 essay, “The Vision of Virtual Reality,” Biocca, Kim, and Levy (1995) argued that the “essential copy” and “physical transcendence” were important drivers in the generation of mixed realities. They described the search for the “essential copy” as seeking a “means to fool the senses—a display that provides a perfect illusory deception,” while “physical transcendence” is rooted in an “ancient desire for escape from the confines of the physical world, [to] free the mind from the ‘prison’ of a body” (Biocca, Kim, and Levy 1995, 7). This theoretical foundation, with the latest mixed reality technology, has inspired the researchers to invest new meaning in digital arts, and to explore the relation between the separator and the physical space, the perception of action, time, space, and our own body.
Project Brief
The “Augmented Coral” project is an installation that curates and expands on digital fabrication and mixed reality work, which is produced by the team at the School of Architecture and Interior Design at the University of Cincinnati. The designers constructed this mixed reality art installation with a physical sculpture and its animated holographic form. The project employed a computational process to design and fabricate an abstract coral sculpture. Then the Microsoft HoloLens near-eye light-field display is used to project an animated holographic simulation. Through sensory perception and the motor response of users, the HMD helps a person to perform a sensorimotor and cognitive activity in a mixed reality world.
Process: From Essential copy to Symbolic Form. Method: Digital Fabrication
First, the designers applied parametric design methods to generate a minimum surface representing a coral form. Using various form optimization algorithms in Kangaroo and mesh-machine in Grasshopper, the minimum surface was converted into 3111 triangular shapes. Then a pathfinding algorithm was applied to group the triangular shapes into 330 patches, which represent the geometrical pattern across a coral surface. These 330 patches were unfolded in Grasshopper with 3824 small holes scripted along their edges. Then the flattened patches were laser cut using polypropylene material. Finally, the designers used 1566 rivet joints to connect 3824 openings. The fabrication and construction process of this artifact expanded on the notion of skin and structure in architecture and created a catalog of assembling possibilities. The architectural tectonic operations such as paneling, folding, and joining were used to create a new expression of the coral form.
Physical Transcendence. Method: Augmented Reality
First, the digital coral was reconstructed using the marching- cube algorithm to simulate the skeletal structure of a coral. Free from the “essential copy” mindset, the new coral model is a symbolic simulation of the reality. The same 330 paths from the pathfinding algorithm were used again to generate an imaginary coral skeleton with the intention of blurring the real and the virtual. The 330 paths were translated into the Autodesk Maya program to construct a bone system. The skeleton was then animated with the Maya animation tools. After transferring the skeleton model into the Unity game engine and HoloLens, the animation was controlled by the user’s gesture and voice. Through the HoloLens spectator system and its semi-transparent “optical see-through” screen, the designers combined computer- generated images with a view of the real world.
Exhibition
The project was exhibited at the 2016 Sculptural Objects Functional Art and Design (SOFA) international fair in Chicago. The installation consisted of an animated hologram projected through the Microsoft HoloLens space-mapping technology and recorded onto live video. The mixed reality environment acted as an imaginary undersea space to host other real sculptures during the SOFA exhibition. The holographic animated coral and other water effects were superimposed on the real sculpture to create an illusion of a marine environment. The HoloLens allowed the public to observe, navigate and manipulate the virtual coral through gestures and voices.
REFERENCES
Biocca, Frank, Taeyong Kim, and Mark R. Levy. 1995. “The Vision of Virtual Reality.” In Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality, edited by Frank Biocca and Mark R. Levy, 3–14. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
MMXIII 2020 — Cincinnati, USA