Alive

augmented reality

Overview

an augmented reality garden experience.

tools

Adobe Aero, Maya

date

Fall 2022

Links

Adobe Aero Link

PROMPT

Using augmented reality (AR) mobile device tools create an immersive experience that engages and challenges the user. Reflect upon the politics, sensations and experience in a specific physical site and respond through your project.Walk from the front steps of the Duke Chapel past the main quads, past the bus stop, down the hill and into the Sarah Duke Gardens. Any site along this path and within the Sarah Duke Gardens may be selected as the site for your project. You are expected to select a site with specific intention and respond to that site with your project. Your project must engage with the site in a compelling, reflective, thoughtful manner. Arbitrary site/project pairings will not be accepted for this project.

Sarah P. duke gardens

What does it mean to be alive?

If you ask a computer, an Oxford Languages dictionary definition will come up with a list of various synonyms under each definition: breathing, moving, flourishing, sentient, and animate are just a few. This concept is expressed in the augmented reality experience a-live.

The name of the piece is a play on words. To be “alive” is to be living, to live. Yet the English prefix a- is to be without, to lack, to not. This reality encapsulates both: to be alive and, simultaneously, not alive. The models are posed as if they are in motion as living, breathing things despite remaining fixed in place. At first glance, they differ very little from the rest of the botanical garden, but upon inspection, they’re clearly mechanical imitations of alive things.Even the experience itself is in genuine; the life you see does not exist in a reality outside the screen it’s viewed on.

Alive

an augmented reality garden experience.

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