Celebrating the Spring Festival in the Forbidden City
—The immersive digital experience exhibition at Palace Museum
About this exhibition:
To celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year, the Palace Museum in Beijing, the capital of China, also known as the Forbidden City, holds a series of exhibitions, "Celebrating the Spring Festival in the Forbidden City". As a part of the exhibition, this immersive digital experience exhibition in the east side gallery of the Palace of Heavenly Purity ( Qianqing gong) is an interactive exhibition with different new technologies.
Our team is the primary development team to build the four interactive installations. I worked as the creative technologist to make the installations with Unity and other hardware. Also, I was the technical support to launch all of the interactive installations in the Palace Museum in Beijing.
Year: 2018-2019
Project Type: Team Project
My Role: Creative Technologist
Tech: Unity, Kinect, Laser RangeFinder
Team Members: Yang Wang(Team Leader), Yue(Melody) Hu, Fanyun Peng
My Work
Eternal Blossom
— An Interactive Chinese Painting
Introduction
This is an interactive painting. Each of the characters is from the “Suizhao“ painting collected in the Palace Museum. When people wave their arms, the butterflies flutter, the flowers sway, the narcissus and the plum blossoms bloom, and the various kinds of fruit are rolling, just like people are into the ancient paintings.
Techniques
Unity + LaserRangeFinder(UST-10LX)
Yue(Melody) Hu put all of the features in the Unity and created interactions and animations for each stuff. My work is to connect Unity with the Laser RangeFinder to map the real space. Credit to Noriyasu Obushi, he is such a nice person to introduce me the UnityURG.
UST-10LX is based on the Ethernet communication, so I first need to set up the ethernet communication on the computer. I need to map the wall (10m x 2.5m) with the canvas in Unity. When an object detected in the real space, a collider generated on the canvas to match it.
The wall in the real space is a 10m x 2.5m canvas. It is an extra long screen that I need to resize the shape of the canvas in Unity to match the resolution ratio on the wall.
Also, when people wave at certain part, the animation will be triggered by their movements. To give the audience a better experience, I marked down all the spots that can trigger the animations.
Final Delivery
NaFuYingXiang
An Immersive Installation with Chinese Calligraphy
Introduction
NaFuYingXiang is an immersive installation with Chinese Calligraphy. This project comes from the two most essential things in the Royal Chinese New Year: the book's opening, the writing of the Ji language - the emperor's blessing to the world, praying for the good fortune of the world. Visitors open their arms to embrace those fortune objects, which increase good luck to them.
Techniques
Unity + Kinect 2.0
This project contains two main functions: background removal and skeleton colliders.
When I visited the space in the Palace Museum, I was faced with two challenges: a. The wall is 10m x 3m, it is quite a big space. b. The clients wanted to change the installation on one wall to both sides of the walls. We have to come up with a solution for it in three days with hardware for only one wall.
To solve the problem, I measured the range that the Kinect can cover. Then we suggested to set up the installation on one side of the wall and project the same contents on the other side of the wall. After my measurement and calculation, I found the Kinect can cover the whole space, so there is no difference for the audience to experience both of the sides.(I found a great website to calculate the Kinect range)
One of the technical challenges is to allow multiple people to interact at the same time. My solution is to create six pairs of skeleton colliders(the maximum numbers one Kinect can detect) at the beginning and put them into a dynamic array. When a person is detected, it will map with a skeleton in the pool. When the person leaves, the skeleton will put back to the array.
Final Delivery
