About the project

The Pixel Dreams interactive art installation was commissioned by Great Northern Way Campus to help celebrate the groundbreaking of the new Centre for Digital Media. The project was developed with a month and a half of concept development and a month and a half of production with a team of five.

Through the concept development and prototyping process, the piece took the shape of two large interactive cube structures powered on the inside by Microsoft Kinect and providing visuals via advanced projection mapping techniques with Unity 3D as the core underlying technology.

The installation provided the audience with the means to literally “step inside” and experience a three-dimensional world built around the theme of nostalgia and the engagement of our child-like wonder of the universe to explore the possibility of digital media and technology. Users were able to fly with a flock of owls through a mountain valley, create solar flares on the surface of a star and conduct their own firework symphony in Vancouver at night.

My Role

As Technical Artist / Director I worked closely with other team members in evaluating technological choices, ensuring that art integration into the game engine was meeting the creative vision, programming, development of lighting and shader effects, tool development, source control, camera assets for projection mapping, rigging for animation, and the physical rigging and wiring of technical assets in the presentation space. I also built the 3D environments for the installation including: skyboxes, terrain, lighting, post-processing effects (e.g. bloom, colour correction) and various 3D assets.

What I Learned

This project brought together numerous technologies in unconventional ways. A large part of the process was evaluating these technologies and figuring out how to “hook them together” through other technologies or tools. This was my first foray into projection mapping and the Microsoft Kinect which provided unique challenges for developing the project: Kinect SDK runs on Windows whereas our projection mapping suite was Mac-based. To get around this obstacle we took advantage of SmartFox Server to build a multiplayer component into Unity that could bring the operating system gap. Restrictions often enable creative solutions.

Developing complex software backends like this shows the important of rapid prototyping and iteration – ‘hacking’ together various tools in a short sprint may be messy at first, but allows for quick evaluation of the technology and better understanding of its capabilities from both art and technical standpoints before entering full production.

Team

Matt Marshall (Technical Artist / Director)

Christine Clark (Project Manager)

Lucas Huang (Lead Programmer)

Leto Yang (Lead Artist)

Vandna Sidher (Researcher / Asst. Director)

Awais Iqbal (Programmer)