Submerse - Liminal Spaces

Submerse: Liminal Spaces is a digital exhibition made by a multi-disciplinary team of two creative technologists, an exhibition designer, and an artist. It is an online showcase of some of our digital works focused on the theme of immersion. We wanted to show how immersive technology can be used to enhance modern creative practice.

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The other technologist on the project, Anthony Woodward, led the Unity development and I assisted him and led the web development. Irina Tsokova of IRDT Design was the project lead and designer and Marina Elia created content for and managed the social media presence.​

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We wanted the digital exhibition to be accessed through the web to increase accessibility. For this we used a Unity WebGL build embedded onto our project website. This meant we had to be careful and optimise the 3D scenes for performance while still maintaining high visual quality. We achieved such high fidelity graphics at relatively low cost by using baked lighting techniques. All the lighting in the scene is pre-baked, meaning light simulations are not carried out during runtime on the users computer. 

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A key feature of the project was our use of

motion capture to create ethereal characters

standing in the museum viewing the exhibits,

one of them is even using an interactive exhibit

with the characters movements matching the

results on the screen.

I was in charge of mocap recording, using an

industry standard Optitrack setup with twenty

cameras. I developed a complex pipeline to

take raw animation data into Maya to apply

it to a model, then export it to Unity for use in

the scene.

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This was one of the largest scale group projects I have worked on and involved both web and Unity development, as well as social media marketing, exhibition design, and graphic design. Irina Tsokova and I showcased the Gujarati AR heritage app, designing the exhibition room to fit with the Gujarati aesthetic and displaying our 3D scanned objects and scanned historical photographs from the Nupur Arts Organisation.