Digital Readymade / VR Gallery
3D • Virtual Reality
The Topic
My Contributions
Cheap custom made prostheses, precious spare-parts, local fabrication: 3D printing is a promising technology in many ways. But a look at the top most downloaded 3D files on the most popular 3D platform “thingiverse” shows: most people still just print gadgetry and crap. Stuff that could better be produced in traditional mass production or not be produced at all. So we wanted to point out this flaw by creating and curating a VR museum around the topic.
As the subject of the assignment was a digital version of the traditional art form „readymade“, we based our VR museum on found digital pieces: 3D models. We rearranged and modified them in a way, that gave them a new, somehow ironic meaning and provided titles to underline that transformation.
This way, some little boats stacked on each other became a „leg prothesis“, a whistle was modified to an „artificial lung“ and a reframed t-rex skull became a „one of a kind shoe“… all living up to the promises of 3D printing technology.
The goal of the project is to explore and practice the artisitic practice, Postdigital and as well applying Virtual Reality on mobile phone.
It was a team project with two people. I was in response in the concept development, 3D CAD drawing and as well part of A-frame coding.
To see the whole experience please enter here !
You can view the virtual exhibition in browser. For VR, VR glasses like Google cardboard, Samsung Gear are required to view. It may take up to 10 seconds until everything is loaded.
The Tech
The entire experience is built with the Open Web VR Framework A-Frame. The 3D models where sourced from thingiverse and any 3D modification was done in Blender. We then loaded the models via A-Frame and placed them in our custom made 3D scene: a several story high, always busy Makerbot (3D Printer).
As A-Frame is entirely based on threeJS it provides a lot of possibilities for interaction. But we wanted our experience to work both in a high end VR Headset and a simple VR Cardboard, so we focused on the line of sight as our only interaction trigger. Looking at the models makes them turn around, float up and down or move in a different way fitting their meaning. While looking at the labels just exposes the titles.
As this was our first VR project at all, we had to deal with a lot of uncertainties and drawbacks. A recurring issue was the sheer data size of our 3D models. Hitting that sweet spot between a performant website and high fidelity models was really challenging. It was also hard to get our text somewhat legible – especially on the low res cardboard display. And despite the fact, that A-frame offers a visual inspector, we hat quite a hard time positioning all objects at the right place in space. Then again, considering the fact the none of us had much knowledge in programming or spatial design, A-Frame was quite accessible for us.
The Exhibition
To underline our concept, we took the quote of 3D-printing-legend Josef Prousa „Everyone’s a maker, only i’m a printer“ and reframed it to „Everyone’s a printer, only i’m a maker“. This statement next to the VR headset was supposed to set the mood for entering our space.
At the first exhibition we presented the piece to our class with a Windows Mixed Reality Headset and a high end gaming laptop. It was quite a success apart from some tracking problems resulting in some minor motion sickness and the fact, that VR is only fun for one participant at a time.
