How can objects serve as a physical hashtag? This project plays with the idea of having physical shapes that serve as a common ground for an archive of known items in Augmented Reality.
What purpose does this serve?
The reason I named it to the Unreliable Toolkit is because these objects ultimately serve no functional purpose ( eg. if it looked like an apple it wouldn't mean you could eat it) and since they are a changing archive, what you get at that moment would be unpredictable. If the concept was pushed further, I think it would be interesting to see how these objects would live if you were to imagine them in a p2p scenario, and what the experience would be if the objects behaved only during a small sliver of time.
( In the scenarios below there are two characters: Monica and Adam )
Imagine This
Monica and Adam both have their set of tool kits. Monica wants to ' give ' Adam an apple so she sends the data to change Adam's sphere into an apple. But, the sphere in Adams hand is in a cycle morphing between different objects within the same shape, and there is only a small window, effected by constraints like location, time, emotions etc. They can only see the intended message at a very precise moment of alignment.
Imagine This
The objects archive is influenced by your memory of similar shaped objects & environments. Now your toolkit becomes personalized to you and your interaction with the world. Monica remembers a fond day when her niece gave her a balloon. It was red, her favorite color, and she remembers the positivity, warmth, and happiness of this small object. She sends her information to Adam's toolkit. The toolkit picks a shape that fits a memory that will elicit the same emotions that Monica felt, but from Adam's memory archive.
Process
We were then asked to create a physical form that was dictated or inspired by our previous images. My form was intended to be viewed at every rotation. With the black background the lines, shape, and image you focus on and see will change, when the black acrylic inside blends in with the background. I liked the idea of pushing things into and out of focus, with just color and shape, constantly redefining the form even though it never changes.
In exploring different interactions within the AR realm, I used three different action word that my AR experience should aim to achieve as a jumping point.
Thinking about visual illusions, I was attracted to signs of humanity : dim lights, scuffed floors, punctured pin boards, ripped help wanted posters etc. I decided to take those images and blur them out, to begin to visually extrapolate the relationship between the positive and negative space created when objects undergo human presence. It was an interesting exercise that helped me think abstractly about how silhouettes can help hide and reveal information.
I was then inspired by the concept of hashtags -- how one word leads to another, what is considered the most popular hashtag and whether or not those images appeared elsewhere and in combination with what other hashtags.
The final form was a collection of basic 3D shapes that would be scene as a morphing object in AR. In the example I used for the demo, you saw a 3D pentagon in physical form, but when you looked through AR, it was morphing through an archive of similarly shaped fruits.
