My second collaboration with artist Jimmy C, to reinterpret one of his paintings of a skull into AR.
We worked on this project a few years ago, back when the HTC Vive was the best VR headset and it needed cabling back to a high-end PC to render the graphics. Originally developed in Touchdesigner.
We had the opportunity to exhibit at the Saatchi Gallary as part of the British Art Fair with Muse and Sedition so we decided to take the concept and recreate it in Unity for the Meta Quest 3 standalone headset with the new Mixed Reality mode.
A week of development, fine-tuning how the particles evolved over time. Used a cutout texture to animate and dissolve the Skull model. Getting Jimmy’s spray-painted drips to look very high quality and wrapping the Skull required re-texturing the old model in Blender. Added a slight bump map on the drips for a bit more detail. We tried it in VR and MR mode and found the Mixed Reality felt much nicer. Hand-tracking proximity to the skull triggers a pulse of particles for some interactivity.
