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The possibilities that technology offers us are growing every day. Access to technical information is becoming easier and easier, and it's free. Lately, I see more and more campaigns promoting new media art. New media art refers to art that combines with technology to create new kinds of experiences and ways of expression.

What did I want to achieve with these technologies? Interactivity and utility. Having a painting on the wall that also does something, not just sits there, seems to me to be the idea of the future. I'm still exploring the options and tools with which I can bring these ideas forward. Below I present the first product in the "painting with utility" category: The Fortune teller, or Ghicitoarea.

The idea was to create a character (the fortune teller) - which once filmed, would display messages like a crystal ball. The aim is to liven up your day with a funny message every day. I started by drawing this character:

Warning, a more technical area follows. You can scroll down to the demo clip if this area is not of interest.

Next, I made the 3D model of the fortune teller (in 3Ds Max), separated it into 2d planes to prepare the terrain for texturing, painted the model (in Photoshop), then imported it into a game engine (Unity). Here I used the android-specific augmented reality library (AR Core) to make the app detect the drawing when the user points the camera at it. Further, I collected over 500 fortune cookies and arranged them in a document. This serves as a database. Next I wrote some C# code, specific to Unity, to randomly select messages from the database and display them. The code also uses mathematical functions (linear interpolation) to animate the incoming and outgoing text, as well as the initial animation of the 3d model's 2d plane. The animation on the face is done through a shader made in unity shader graph. Also used shader graph to make the shader for the coat and the shader for the chains, which makes them move subtly.

Below is a demonstration of the app's functionality:

If you have any ideas that you think I could implement in this way, you can write to me below in the comments section.

Visit the blog section for more such projects: https://embstudio.ro/blog/

Ersin