Purell Wonderland

Purell Wonderland is an organic virtual place designed for making fun of social or behavioral responses to coronavirus.

Dan Qi Qian

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Az2XIGQRQ7A&feature=youtu.be

Description

Purell Wonderland is designed in a time when quarantine first started, and our social behavior was just being deployed to assuage fears, understand risk, improve public health and implement social distancing strategies.

For the designer herself, she got bored for staying at her room in the first 2 weeks in the quarantine, and was touched by new-born flowers once she went out for a walk. She believes we all have some connections with the nature and that matters.

That's why she designed a place where provides exposure to a virtual nature and humor to help ease coronavirus anxiety. The landscape is shaped with graphical lines into the look of hand sanitizer, an essential object in current social environment, but it's hard to recognize until you reach to a higher place.

IMA/ITP New York
ITPG-GT.2177.001
Synthetic Architectures
VR\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\AR,Play/Games

Surrounds

An app or a solution that uses AR technology to manage user conversations while doing live streaming.

Jinzhong Yu

https://youtu.be/K1oP1jwbKFQ

Description

Surrounds is an app or a solution that manages chats and conversations while doing live streaming. It adopts AR technology to categorize user comments and binds them to specific items in the streaming to make conversations organized.

Currently, there exist several ways of interaction during live streaming — Virtual Gifts, Comments Systems, or Danmaku Systems. However, all information or chats are totally wrapped up and mixed together. They are vaguely bound only to the streaming itself, rather than the specific topics inside. Survey shows that most users find it annoying when over 25% of the screen is covered by danmaku (a set of scrolling texts floating on the screen), especially when the texts are little related to the topic. So, when the streaming is covering large scale of topics or presenting complicated ideas or scenes, chats are completely garbled and hard to locate.

So, I designed Surrounds, which uses Google ARCore to detect and track objects in the streaming in order to categorize the ungrouped messages into various chatting groups. By using Firebase Realtime Database, the messages can be synchronized along with the streaming data and kept permanent. When the user opens a live streaming session, the application will automatically find objects on the screen and attach a clickable indicator on them. By clicking the indicator, the user will join a public group where all the messages here are specifically related to the object. This design allows users to receive only the intended information they are interested in, and hence reduce the spam of information.

Although the system is not perfectly designed and lots of other issues need to be concerned, it sophistically provides users a structured and clearer view of information during live streaming. It makes the users target the topic they are favor of and hence helps the users refine their inspiration on streaming.

IMA/IMB Shanghai
INTM-SHU.401.3
Capstone Studio (Shanghai)
VRAR,Mobile

Subjective Mapping: (Re)visit NYUSH and its memories

A digital subjective map of the 8th floor IMA space at the NYUSH Pudong campus, where users leave and share their memories attached to any location.

Zheng Zhang

https://youtu.be/plVQvrSiIhQ

Description

Distinct from traditional mapping/cartography which intends to represent a territory as close to reality as possible, subjective mapping aims at producing a map using one’s own physical sense, emotion and memories that are not necessarily objective. Subjective mapping can be understood as the cognitive process that one reproduces his/her “story of experiences” at a specific location through making a map of the place (Nomadways). In creating such a map, one “stores and expresses his/her emotions into minimalistic shapes”.

The physical territory of the IMA spaces, added with personal annotations, is a community-created subjective map. The idea of this project is born from the context that our school is moving to a new campus in the Shanghai Qiantan area, and the current building will no longer be accessible by the NYU Shanghai community.

This project is aimed at creating a digital heritage of the current campus with students’ memory attachments, so that we can go back and revisit our alma mater when we are not able to do so physically in the future. Given the COVID-19 situation, the goal of this project can be extended to provide a community space for students, fellows and faculties to bond with each other while the campus is inaccessible. The project utilizes 1) Mozilla Hubs as the frontend and backend to host both the virtual space of the Pudong campus as well as personal memory pins in various forms, and 2) Spoke by Mozilla to create the 3D model of the campus itself. Given time constraints, this project focuses on objectively mapping the 8th floor of the Pudong campus and intends to create a subjective map of spaces related to IMA. The project will allow users to immerse themselves in the building, interact with other online users, and to drop down “pins of memory” at any location.

In a broader sense, this project will enable the current and future NYU Shanghai community to have an accessible space to document their individual attachments about the Pudong campus. Furthermore, it can also be a place for people to share their attachments, and thus enhance connections within the community.

IMA/IMB Shanghai
INTM-SHU.401.2
Capstone Studio (Shanghai)
VR\\AR,Tool\\Service