“The mobile app and AR made it possible. We thank PHYGITALISM for helping us become the first exhibition in Russia to introduce such content to a wide audience and basically make it accessible to everyone…”

Crestina Lancova
Producer at Artlife

The interactive AR-gallery with the native UX guides the exhibition visitors through watching digital layers of paintings and listening to the audio guide, and allows them to make in-app purchases of art courses

Development

Application was based on the Vuforia SDK, so we could experiment with different mechanics on two mobile platforms: iOS and Android

Alive artworks

Some of the paintings were enhanced in 2D, other paintings were augmented with 3D objects, so that the visual effects went beyond the boundaries of the painting

Apart from creating the content in the augmented reality, our task was also to study the concept that stands behind every picture. Every work of art is unique and we needed to create a digital layer that would emphasize it, so our choice of the mechanism was influenced by the author’s initial idea

AI as a creator

For accelerating the development process we used artificial intelligence as an assistant to our XR artists. In other words, we embraced the concept of intelligence amplification — the co-creative collaboration of people and artificial intelligence

We used neural networks that helped designers come up with new interesting unpredictable approaches. By testing new technologies for artistic purposes, we accelerated the process of working on paintings, optimized routine
workflow, and experimented with new style