Art of Movement
KIA
KIA wanted to create an interactive customer experience to celebrate their brand message.
Movement that Inspires.
Elevating brand awareness through delightful interactions is an exciting opportunity (as well as an art form of it’s own). Our challenge was to use AR Body Tracking technology that was engaging for the participants and connected with the brand goals of KIA.
From the very beginning we wanted users to control the experience with their body movement. The portability and fidelity of ARKit tracking on iPad made for an easy choice on the hardware. Initial prototypes were created to identify the limits and opportunities for the participants with that setup.
Exploring ARKit body tracking and custom gesture triggers.
Connecting the experience to an array of screens provided the opportunity for the experience to feel like a life sized digital mirror.
Drawing with you hands would inspire movement from the participants and hopefully give them a drawing they could take away from their experience. The initial prototype proved challenging to create something that was very expressive.
Introducing a kinematic chain to the stroke that came from the user’s hands added a life to the stroke, which was now more of a ribbon, that made it feel more alive and had a more fluid aesthetic with the curves that it produced.
Animating colors with a glow further added to the energy of the ribbon.
A curiosity for the user started to surface as gestures and hand velocity were reflected back through physical attributes we are accustomed to experiencing in our analog lives. That sense of delight we were in pursuit of started to connect.
Wanting users to have a take away, the next challenge was to make it so the experience resulted in artwork that reflected the participants interactions.
Adding more ribbons between the tracked hand positions started to identify a composition that felt appealing on several levels.
The added goal of wanting to give visitors something they could take away and possibly share online lead quickly to the idea of allowing the participants to create art through their interactions.
We built a interactive kiosk for generating 3D Spirograph (like) compositions with your body movement.
Powered by an iPad Pro with the recent LiDAR sensor, we used ARKit’s Body Tracking to mirror the participants skeleton and control physics based ribbons with their hands.
Since the tracking system understood when and where a human was within the play area, we were able to automate the interaction states based on participation cues of people moving in and out of the space.