Lin Yu Shan VR Exhibit

The past few months we’ve been working with National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung to develop 5 different experiences for their national treasure painting from Lin Yu Shan. The exhibit is live now until the end of March 2017.

The exhibits include:

1. A Purikura Machine
2. 4dx Art VR Flythrough Experience
3. Standing Art VR Experience
4. Interactive Multi Projector Panorama
5. 360 Cardboard Experience

We had a short 4 months to develop these using the famous painting provided to us from the museum. It was quite a challenging process and we had to develop new tools to make the experiences possible.

Purikura Machine

Using a Logitech C920 and U Chroma Key ($25) we created a background foreground composite purikura machine using art assets from the painting. The visitors can snap a photo and email it their own inbox from the computer at the museum.

4dx Art VR Flythrough Experience

Using sponsored HTC Vives, we developed our own 4dx seats using hydraulic pumps, 2 AC fans and a bass shaker all controlled using Arduino via Unity. The ride flies through the entire painting scene atop the back of a dragonfly. The user shrinks down to the size of a bug and they get to view the work from a micro perspective.

4dx Standing Art VR Experience

Using the sponsored HTC Vives and the controllers, we created 3 teleport zones in the paining for the user to switch between. Inside each zone, the user has different tools on their hands to interact with the scene around them, including a brush and notebook, and a fishnet and pail. The plants in the scene will bend upon touch and the controllers provide haptic feedback if they are hitting a plant, placing their hands underwater, or touching other animals. The trigger on the controllers allows the user to control the time, allowing them to switch rapidly between night and day in the scene. 2 AC fans controlled with Arduinos were also used.

Interactive Multi Projector Panorama

Using 4 projectors and a semi circular curved surface, we created a tool to allow the deformation of projected images onto unique surfaces and blend the images between multiple projectors. Atop the projectors, we also attached IR lights and black and white cameras using and IR filter. With the filtered image, we used OpenCV ($95) to pass the images to Unity and map them with AV Pro Live Camera ($200).

We will be launching our Multi Projector Blend asset to the Asset Store in the near future.

360 Cardboard Experience

From creating the cardboard goggles from scratch and getting it verified from Google, we developed our own construction method and used specialized cardboard for the experience. The flythrough scene was rendered out as a 360 video using VR Panorama PRO 360 Renderer ($40), and with Easy Movie Texture ($65) we were able to project the 360 video on to a sphere for playback using Google Cardboard Unity API.