OK hi I’m andi mcc, of Mermaid Heavy Industries / Run Hello . Probably the best way to summarize my work is this link. I like generative art and complex imagery that arises from simple algorithms, and I like confusing people.
Launchpad is going to be a bit of a challenge to participate in for me. I spent the few months before the Launchpad program started actually working on a *different* prototype, which I am now trying to develop into a commercial product. So this makes this an awkward time to start on a separate prototype… still, I do have one idea I've been wanting to explore, so I'm going to start on that and see how long I can stick with it.
What I've been thinking about is this particular strain within 30s-50s abstract-expressionist art which relied heavily on big solid fields of color, and foregrounding the physical nature of the paint— emphasizing rather than trying to hide the fact that paintings are in fact made of paint, and sometimes letting paint do things paint isn't "supposed" to do, like drip down the canvas.
(Franz Kline, probably the 30s-40s somewhere??)
(Clyfford Still, 1950)
I've been interested for a bit now in the idea of using VR to simulate the experience of walking around "inside" of one of these paintings. A couple of things that I think would be interesting "feeling"s:
- Moving around some enormous flat-shaded object that you can only see as a silhouette.
- The sensation that something looming above you is melting, or dripping (I think this would feel interestingly claustrophobic).
Mechanically, I'm interested in the idea of splitting the world into a pair of colored fields, and treating both as "portals" into another space. So for example consider the Clyfford Still piece above; if you turn it sideways, it's easy to get your eye to interpret that as either a jagged yellow object on top of a black field, or a jagged black object on a yellow field. If this was in VR, I like the idea that if you faced the black area and just started walking you'd find yourself in a black room, whereas if you faced the yellow area and started walking you'd find yourself in a yellow room. You could construct a maze within the 5 feet square VR players actually have to work with by repeatedly folding space back on itself and having the player walk in circles between color-portals leading to different rooms.
To make this work, I intend to combine:
- The Unity Raymarching Toolkit by Kevin Watters and Fernando Ramallo, which can render signed-distance-field functions directly and would I think be a good way of rendering things like blobs of "dripping paint"
- Some sort of shader??? that allows me to decide on a per-pixel basis which of multiple scenes to display, so that once I can implement the "portals".
Launchpad is going to be a bit of a challenge to participate in for me. I spent the few months before the Launchpad program started actually working on a *different* prototype, which I am now trying to develop into a commercial product. So this makes this an awkward time to start on a separate prototype… still, I do have one idea I've been wanting to explore, so I'm going to start on that and see how long I can stick with it.
What I've been thinking about is this particular strain within 30s-50s abstract-expressionist art which relied heavily on big solid fields of color, and foregrounding the physical nature of the paint— emphasizing rather than trying to hide the fact that paintings are in fact made of paint, and sometimes letting paint do things paint isn't "supposed" to do, like drip down the canvas.
(Franz Kline, probably the 30s-40s somewhere??)
(Clyfford Still, 1950)
I've been interested for a bit now in the idea of using VR to simulate the experience of walking around "inside" of one of these paintings. A couple of things that I think would be interesting "feeling"s:
- Moving around some enormous flat-shaded object that you can only see as a silhouette.
- The sensation that something looming above you is melting, or dripping (I think this would feel interestingly claustrophobic).
Mechanically, I'm interested in the idea of splitting the world into a pair of colored fields, and treating both as "portals" into another space. So for example consider the Clyfford Still piece above; if you turn it sideways, it's easy to get your eye to interpret that as either a jagged yellow object on top of a black field, or a jagged black object on a yellow field. If this was in VR, I like the idea that if you faced the black area and just started walking you'd find yourself in a black room, whereas if you faced the yellow area and started walking you'd find yourself in a yellow room. You could construct a maze within the 5 feet square VR players actually have to work with by repeatedly folding space back on itself and having the player walk in circles between color-portals leading to different rooms.
To make this work, I intend to combine:
- The Unity Raymarching Toolkit by Kevin Watters and Fernando Ramallo, which can render signed-distance-field functions directly and would I think be a good way of rendering things like blobs of "dripping paint"
- Some sort of shader??? that allows me to decide on a per-pixel basis which of multiple scenes to display, so that once I can implement the "portals".
OK hi I’m andi mcc, of Mermaid Heavy Industries / Run Hello . Probably the best way to summarize my work is this link. I like generative art and complex imagery that arises from simple algorithms, and I like confusing people.
Launchpad is going to be a bit of a challenge to participate in for me. I spent the few months before the Launchpad program started actually working on a *different* prototype, which I am now trying to develop into a commercial product. So this makes this an awkward time to start on a separate prototype… still, I do have one idea I've been wanting to explore, so I'm going to start on that and see how long I can stick with it.
What I've been thinking about is this particular strain within 30s-50s abstract-expressionist art which relied heavily on big solid fields of color, and foregrounding the physical nature of the paint— emphasizing rather than trying to hide the fact that paintings are in fact made of paint, and sometimes letting paint do things paint isn't "supposed" to do, like drip down the canvas.
(Franz Kline, probably the 30s-40s somewhere??)
(Clyfford Still, 1950)
I've been interested for a bit now in the idea of using VR to simulate the experience of walking around "inside" of one of these paintings. A couple of things that I think would be interesting "feeling"s:
- Moving around some enormous flat-shaded object that you can only see as a silhouette.
- The sensation that something looming above you is melting, or dripping (I think this would feel interestingly claustrophobic).
Mechanically, I'm interested in the idea of splitting the world into a pair of colored fields, and treating both as "portals" into another space. So for example consider the Clyfford Still piece above; if you turn it sideways, it's easy to get your eye to interpret that as either a jagged yellow object on top of a black field, or a jagged black object on a yellow field. If this was in VR, I like the idea that if you faced the black area and just started walking you'd find yourself in a black room, whereas if you faced the yellow area and started walking you'd find yourself in a yellow room. You could construct a maze within the 5 feet square VR players actually have to work with by repeatedly folding space back on itself and having the player walk in circles between color-portals leading to different rooms.
To make this work, I intend to combine:
- The Unity Raymarching Toolkit by Kevin Watters and Fernando Ramallo, which can render signed-distance-field functions directly and would I think be a good way of rendering things like blobs of "dripping paint"
- Some sort of shader??? that allows me to decide on a per-pixel basis which of multiple scenes to display, so that once I can implement the "portals".
Launchpad is going to be a bit of a challenge to participate in for me. I spent the few months before the Launchpad program started actually working on a *different* prototype, which I am now trying to develop into a commercial product. So this makes this an awkward time to start on a separate prototype… still, I do have one idea I've been wanting to explore, so I'm going to start on that and see how long I can stick with it.
What I've been thinking about is this particular strain within 30s-50s abstract-expressionist art which relied heavily on big solid fields of color, and foregrounding the physical nature of the paint— emphasizing rather than trying to hide the fact that paintings are in fact made of paint, and sometimes letting paint do things paint isn't "supposed" to do, like drip down the canvas.
(Franz Kline, probably the 30s-40s somewhere??)
(Clyfford Still, 1950)
I've been interested for a bit now in the idea of using VR to simulate the experience of walking around "inside" of one of these paintings. A couple of things that I think would be interesting "feeling"s:
- Moving around some enormous flat-shaded object that you can only see as a silhouette.
- The sensation that something looming above you is melting, or dripping (I think this would feel interestingly claustrophobic).
Mechanically, I'm interested in the idea of splitting the world into a pair of colored fields, and treating both as "portals" into another space. So for example consider the Clyfford Still piece above; if you turn it sideways, it's easy to get your eye to interpret that as either a jagged yellow object on top of a black field, or a jagged black object on a yellow field. If this was in VR, I like the idea that if you faced the black area and just started walking you'd find yourself in a black room, whereas if you faced the yellow area and started walking you'd find yourself in a yellow room. You could construct a maze within the 5 feet square VR players actually have to work with by repeatedly folding space back on itself and having the player walk in circles between color-portals leading to different rooms.
To make this work, I intend to combine:
- The Unity Raymarching Toolkit by Kevin Watters and Fernando Ramallo, which can render signed-distance-field functions directly and would I think be a good way of rendering things like blobs of "dripping paint"
- Some sort of shader??? that allows me to decide on a per-pixel basis which of multiple scenes to display, so that once I can implement the "portals".
