Time: 19 Nov 2016 - 20 Nov 2016
Location: MIT Media Lab
Prize: MIT Media Lab Hacking Arts Hackathon Hackers' Choice Award
Role: HTC Vive developer
Inkfinity provides a new way to explore the art world without limits. By using the VR technology, the user could enjoy the art in a different world. Multiple dimension interaction will give the user totally new feeling about the art.
Current museum/gallery experience viewing fine arts, especially classical east Asian arts, is often confusing and alienating. Viewers may wonder about the story, intention and cultural context underlying the artworks, but current services at the museum do not effectively address those questions.
We leveraged VR technology to create an immersive, interactive and personalized poetic journey, where the viewers will enter the world depicted in the artworks, explore the aesthetics in full details and experience the cultural ethos first-hand.
We built the entire product out of scratch, partly due to the complete lack of available assets on ink art motifs/texture/text font in VR community.
Plus, the east Asian ink paintings are renown for multi-focal points and intentional “leaving space blank” (to leave up to viewer's imagination) - we had to improvise how the 2D would transform into the 3D, without obscuring the artist’s intention but still exercise our creative muscles to present our interpretation of the cultural heritage.
Inkfinity could be applied in many areas. For art institutions, the user could enjoy the art in VR world and view the artistic work in 3D rather than 2D. It could also be used in education. For example, anyone could recreate the current artistic work in the VR world and add their own ideas in the worldwide famous artworks. For private collector, the user could use Inkfinity to get a different angle to view the art.
