Have your portrait drawn in VR, and experience a short ancient tale from Turkmenistan in VR painting in Tilt Brush.

http://akmyrat.com

Description

Have your portrait draw in VR in Tilt Brush.

Uzuklar, a tale about the power of music that I grew up with in Turkmenistan, has always peaked my interest. It is a folklore that has been passed on orally through centuries by Turkmen musicians – dutar masters. Using Tilt Brush by Google, a VR painting tool, I created a VR mural telling the ancient legend. Uzuklar is a part of a virtual reality documentary delving into my father Suhan Tuyliyev’s mind and depression as a composer after the collapse of the USSR.

Classes

Fairy Tales for the 21st Century, Worlds on a Wire: Narrative Storytelling in VR

Simulation theory virtual reality piece combining 360 video and Unreal gaming Engine.

Description

A 360 video embedded in Unreal. The viewer puts on the headset and finds themselves in a psychiatrist's office. They look down and see a body (a mannequin). The doctor tells them they've been complaining about hallucinations and then they revisit a memory together. The memory takes place in a bar and glitches start occurring. People start disappearing in the room and things get weirder and weirder. Then they viewer finds themselves back in the psychiatrist's office before the whole world fractures apart around them revealing that they've been in the Unreal world the whole time. They find out they've been sentenced to prison to live in a simulation of their own personal hell.

Classes

Directing Virtual Reality

A VR short that puts you in the perspective of the ingredients as a meal is being made.

https://youtu.be/cKsAk3Siyhk

Description

The full piece will allow the audience to choose between experiencing a salad being made (linked in video documentation) or a burger (which is the Project URL YouTube link). We use a Gear VR for viewing the 360 video. For the interaction, we are using Wonda VR and gaze detection.

Work to be completed: Info popups using Wonda VR 360 video editing software. Sound Spatialization using the Reaper DAW.

Classes

Directing Virtual Reality, Directing Virtual Reality

A part-live action, part-animated, virtual reality experience about gentrification in central Brooklyn. A collaboration between Grad Film & ITP.

http://www.alexzimmer.com/brooklynhorrorstory

Description

you enter into a park emptying of people as a film begins to play on the projector. the sun is setting and you feel as though everyone is leaving and you are the only one left. as the film continues, buildings begin to fall off the street and others grow in their place, if you turn around you will see lifeless characters arrive to sit and watch the film. a plethora of experiences, aesthetic and story-driven, are meant to give you a feeling of loss and replacement.

Classes

Directing Virtual Reality, Directing Virtual Reality

My project is a battery made from scratch that powers a high efficiency LED. The goal is to embrace newest available lighting technology combined with materials that are normally discarded.

https://itp.nyu.edu/thesis2017/project/aaron-parsekian

Description

Can something high tech be powered by trash? My design combines the newest LED technology currently available with a battery made of simple, often thrown away materials as its power source. I put these two elements together to create a portable lantern that is both a useful light and a source of recycling intrigue. This lantern hopefully demonstrates the broad scope of materials we have here on earth, both old and new, and combines them. I decided to try and create a power source out of paper, metal, plastic, and organic materials from the trash and then publish a construction guide to recreate it using simple household tools.

Classes

Basic Analog Circuits, Project Development Studio, Thesis

Captive Audience was inspired by President Trump and the audiences that he paid for; if he can have meaningless applause, so can you with Captive Audience!

https://itpreadymades.wordpress.com/2017/05/07/captive-audience-2/

Description

This project was inspired by the nascent presidency of Donald Trump. He bragged about his standing ovations from the FBI and other audiences, seemingly unaware that the applause was coerced or otherwise forced. If the president could express such pride for what was ultimately an empty gesture, why shouldn’t you or I feel this great? Consequentially, I created this machine.

But pride like this isn’t exclusively the territory of the president; motivational speakers, athletes, and other entertainers get similar treatment. It’s not a political piece; rather, it speaks to the human capacity to imagine reasons behind emotional events. The hands are not clapping for anything you’ve really done, but it feels like they are.

Congratulations!

Classes

Readymades

Me, myself and .io is a projection-based augmented reality (AR) installation about who I am as seen through both my physical and digital data.

https://itp.nyu.edu/thesis2017/project/ws1236

Description

It used to be said that on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. Well, I beg to differ. The internet knows exactly who you are. Our digital footprint is an ongoing record of our unfiltered desires and obsessions and is traceable by both us and the big corporates. While they are selling our data to advertisers and the government, I think there’s something I can do at a very personal level using the same data. Because even though Google knows me very well, it doesn’t care about me the way I do. Me, myself and .io serves as a way for me to better understand myself by retracing my digital footprints.

Classes

Thesis

its_ok is a collection of different performance art pieces, physical installations and the software specifically made for them.

http://montoyamoraga.io/its_ok/

Description

My project is called its_ok and is a series of both art pieces and software tools that I built. It includes web applications, terminal applications, websites, live performance tools, that I will demo in the show.

Classes

Reading and Writing Electronic Text, Thesis

CLOSED CELLS, OPEN WOUNDS is virtual reality documentary experience that aims to address the core issue to the mass incarceration crisis that is plaguing this country.

http://itp.nyu.edu/thesis2017/project/bh376

Description

CLOSED CELLS, OPEN WOUNDS is virtual reality documentary experience that aims to address the core issue to the mass incarceration crisis that is plaguing this country. Much research shows that poor communities of color are becoming incarcerated at alarming rates for the past 30 years, and thereby resulting in a significant part of our population to be condemned to a vicious cycle of a lifetime of repeated arrests.

Many ask why is this the case? In this VR experience, we hear first hand from a young New Yorker, who was criminalized and incarcerated at age 16. By telling his story in VR, we will learn how both his community and jail are linked due to a lack of adequate help and reform from officials.

This story will be told by two siblings (a brother and a sister) who will appear in the experience and talk about their Harlem neighborhood, the older brother’s first arrest at, and how it impacted their family. This is an emotional conversation, filled with tough questions, self-reflection, and tears.

The aesthetics of this VR documentary film will appear to be of a minimalist look in black negative space. Their story will be told in deconstructed sections as the viewer travels down the hallway, creating symbolic metaphors of this damaging system.

The project is currently a work in progress, and will be completed within the coming months. The experience will eventually be enhanced by graphic effects and animations that will be added in the future. Some of the tools used to create this experience will be traditional filmmaking and photography, photogrammetry, Unreal Game Engine, Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, and DepthKit.

CLOSED CELLS, OPEN WOUNDS is powerfully emotional experience that uses of a variety of artistic mediums to creative a living collage that communicates the destructive impact of this ongoing crisis in America.

Classes

Thesis, Worlds on a Wire: Narrative Storytelling in VR

An immersive installation that explores the distortion of memory and the unstable processes of remembrance through photographs that come alive in response to the position of the onlooker.

Description

Here and There is an interactive installation that immerses the spectator in the world of abandoned and faded memories with distorted photographs that light up and trigger sound when the user 'selects' them with their hand. The project uses tracking devices and projection mapping to design an voyeur-like audiovisual experience that creates a sense of awe and nostalgia in the spectator and strives to connect them to their own memories.

Classes

Thesis