The brief challenges me to create an interactive immersive experience according to the theme of “transmogrify”.
I built an AR Face Mask app with Unity in three weeks, from knowing nothing about Unity to being able to build an app with it.
First, I start from films and movies to look for inspiration. I watched the “Black Mirror” series to learn about how people imagine the extreme of how will technology evolve in the future. I saw in the series they have use smart devices to grade people or block people.
Then I start to go on the news and internet to look what other people are working on. Makeup artist on the internet have try using makeup and materials to change the shape and the feature of our faces, this way the surveillance cameras will not be able to identify user by appearance.
Then I start to look at how artist does with visual appearance. So in physical world I looked at different artist and how they interact with appearances, I looked at two different artists “Annegret Soltau” and “Maurizio Anzeri”, these two artists have interact with appearance with collage and sewing to create a new identity.
As for the theme Transmogrify, I looked at an animation artist on YouTube “Cyraik”, he uses After Effect to change shapes or duplicate objects. From his work, I learned how appearance can change dramatically and how that can impact human facial identity.
For more about AR/VR pjs, I start going on social media and on Twitter I found an account “Parker Gibbons” he has used machine learning skills to capture different parts of human face and pj it onto his face and also in Japan they have used AR to pj a crab on their restaurant in order to promote their restaurant. On Instagram, I found this artist “Thomas Webb”, he uses code to create a filter that shows personal detail on their faces.
One step at a time, before getting into face tracking, I started with image tracking. I use Vuforia as the platform to create a whale swimming on the image. I used an as the image material and placed the whale swimming under the ImageTarget, this will make the animation to trigger when I show the camera the image.
I have use AR Foundation and “Face Manager” to be a Game Object. For the mask I use Photoshop to create a png file to import it on to the material in Unity. The problem of using AR Face Tracking in Unity is it only works on iPhone X above.
I have created multiple filters to create from personal details to face collages. From the personal details so the user can see what they actually look like on social media. And also I have create collages so the users can hide their identity
