A Brief Video About A Site-Specific Virtual Sculpture
This project is due on Monday, November 25.
The site is a place where a piece should be but isn't. -- Robert Smithson
In this assignment, you are asked to create and document a custom Unity AR app, in order to:
- place and view a virtual thing of your choice,
- at a scale of your choice,
- in a specific location of your choice,
- with a programmatic behavior of your choice.
Justify your decisions and document your process. It is assumed that your project will run on a mobile device, but if necessary, it could be possible to use your laptop instead. Use this project as an opportunity to learn how to do something new in Unity. Note that the storytelling in your video is as important as the software you make!
- Your thing (object, sculpture, phenomenon, etc.) may be appropriated, recycled, or constructed. For example, you could download a readymade 3D model from the Internet, or you could model something in Blender, Rhino or Maya. You might conceive of your object as a "sculpture", "monument", "installation", "decoration", etc. or as something else entirely (an "anomaly", "natural formation", cryptozoological phenomenon, etc.).
- Your location may be public, private, generic, etc. (with the only restriction: it may not be the STUDIO classroom). For example, your site could be a prominent and unique location (the CMU Fence, Phipps Botanical Gardens), or it could be a generic-seeming place (a supermarket meat section), or it could be a very personal spot (your bedroom, or the palm of your hand).
- Your programmatic behavior should be some code you have written that makes the object do something. For example, it could spin (rotate) in place, or bob up and down, sinusoidally; it could emit a shower of particles (like a fountain); it could change size whenever the viewer gets close; it could swap out for a variant whenever the viewer looks away and looks back.
Document your project in a (single) video. It is recommended that you combine screen-grabbed video (to show what someone is seeing in the phone), with over-the-shoulder video (to show the context in which the AR is observed). It could be helpful to include a soundtrack. It is OK if your video is brief! If your concept can be effectively communicated in as little as 10 seconds, that's fine/great.
- Create a blog post, with the title nickname-arsculpture.
- Give your blog post the Category, 10-arsculpture.
- Provide a very brief one-sentence description of your project, and list the nicknames of the collaborators who made it.
- Include a video/GIF object, showing the screenshot media, edited together with the over-the-shoulder media. Including both video and animated-GIF media would be ideal.
- Include a brief text about your project. Discuss the relations you have established between object, environment, and viewer. Why is this object in this place?
- You are welcome to work alone or in pairs. It's fine if one of the collaborators blogs the project, and the other collaborator just links to the other one's documentation page.
Consider: