360° Mobile VR Art Apps are research projects for interactive art installations. In museums, galleries and media art festivals the mobile display can be projected on one or more walls in the exhibition space. Visitors can interact using smartphones or tablets and become performers. As experimental research projects conceptualised, designed and developed in collaboration with Antonio Zea, Birgit Kempker, Florian Faion, Markus Kirchhofer, Shervin Saremi and the Intelligent Sensor-Actuator-Systems Laboratoy (ISAS) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
Please install the die mobile apps and experiment with them on your own smartphone or tablet.
Overview 360° Mobile VR Art Apps
- Mobile Apps
- Versions in Comparison
- Exhibition Space
- Download
- Credits
10.000 Moving Cities – Same but Different
Mobile App as Interface for Net-Based Installations
10.000 Moving Cities – Same but Different deals with urbanization and globalization in the digital age. The user navigates through an urban environment of his choice. The landscape is constantly reshaped and redefined by posts on the social networks Freesound, Instagram and Twitter. Here these personal impressions are streamed in real time like windows to our changing world. The viewer participates in the social movements of our time and makes a virtual journey into constantly new image and sound collages in which one experiences local, cultural and linguistic differences and similarities. In virtual space, this information is visualized on cubes that rise at different heights to become a kind of skyline. The work deals with how our cities are continuously changing and increasingly resemble one. This results in more and more non-places/places of lost places in the sense of Marc Augé’s book and essay Non-Places, which could exist all over the world without any true local identity (such as motorways, hotel rooms, airports or supermarkets).
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10.000 Moving Cities – Same but Different, AR (Augmented Reality)
Mobile App, AR Single- and Multiplayer Game
High towers rise into the sky, every place becomes a city.
With the Augmented Reality App 10.000 Moving Cities – Same but Different one moves between the imaginary buildings via smartphone and tablet and participates in the digital communication streams and social movements of our time by means of inserted Social Media Posts. The buildings can be destroyed and rebuilt by the users. But beware! Everyone sees what the other is doing from different perspectives. The more buildings disappear, the more creatures appear.
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Single- and Multiplayer Version
CAON – control and optimize nature
Mobile App for Interactive Installations
Imagining a speculative future where technological solutionism has been taken to an extreme, CAON – control and optimize nature explores the potential of advanced technologies in the management of future ecosystems. In a habitat where animal, fungi, and plant species have been modified by 3D printing, CRISPR, and synthetic biology, the viewer observes an AI preventing the delicate ecosystem from collapsing. Interacting with a smartphone, through the perspective of an AI simulator, the audiences are invited to fly with the created species, optimize them further, and observe the changing ecosystem. CAON responds to the trend of technology-assisted solution-making by constructing narratives of an uncomputable system under extreme control. The project aims to inspect our tendency to simplify complex ecosystems by treating nature as a system that can be calculated and fixed.
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Friends
Mobile App as Interface for Net-Based Installations
NVIDIA got the world talking in December 2018 after showing off a new AI that can create ultra-realistic photos of people who don’t actually exist. Friends is playing with this massive amount of AI-generated ultra-realistic photos and offers a novel and fascinating way of experimenting with machine learning and automated AI-generated content that is not limited to face generation.
Using a mobile phone or tablet, countless faces constantly looking at me, observe me from all directions. These rather ordinary looking portraits, they’re all fake. Not in the sense that they were Photoshopped, but rather they were completely generated by artificial intelligence. None of these people actually exist.
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Me, Myself & I
Mobile App as Interface for Interactive Installations
The digital age illustrates that we often see ourselves as the centre of the world rather than being part of society. With “Me, Myself & I”, the user floats virtually in self-absorbed ego-relationship above an urban cityscape and turns into an egocentric superstar with no room left for altruism. Egocentrism and narcissism are widespread phenomena, as the selfie culture proves: We send these mini-me’s into the world to make others aware of who we are. These messages are characterized by fictions, fantasies, exhibitionism, confession, self-admiration, solipsism – motifs that can keep us busy and determine a large part of our activities. At the same time, culture and media construct our perceived reality by creating desires and fantasies, leading us further and further away from reality. These desires and fantasies form our subconscious mind and shape our actions.
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MORE AND LESS – flying through a three-dimensional Book
Mobile App as Interface for Net-Based Installations
Since 1950, the urban world population has risen by over three billion people. The world’s population continues to grow from today’s 7.6 billion to an estimated 9.8 billion people in 2050. People are in need of more space, and animals habitats are being threatened. Some animal species have died out and become extinct; such as the European Terrestrial Leech, the Pyrenean Ibex, and the Chinese Freshwater Dolphin. Every day, a three-digit number of species perish. From a European perspective, many animals disappear in remote areas unnoticed. How do people and artists deal with this constellation?
Media art, lyrics, facts about population development and animal extinction are brought together in a unique interdisciplinary project.
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Nonplace – the Age of the Anthropocene
360° Mobile VR App
Nonplace – the Age of the Anthropocene explores the relationship between humans and nature in the Anthropocene era. Humans have become one of the most important factors influencing the biological, geological and atmospheric processes on Earth. The 360° New Media Art Mobile VR App Nonplace – the Age of the Anthropocene points to the loss of identities through technological progress and globalization and poses the question of what the ever-growing similarity of cities, shopping centers and commodities means.
With Nonplace – the Age of the Anthropocene you fly through an endless futuristic city and individualise the high-rise buildings with your images. The high-rise buildings all look the same and form an endless city, in which there are no differences. Flying through the city, you project individual images onto the high-rise buildings, which are automatically captured with the camera from your surroundings. That’s how you shape the city with identity. But this decays again, continuously.
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Speculative Evolution
Mobile App for Interactive Installations
Speculative Evolution by Marc Lee is a 3D simulation and art project in which hybrid creatures populate a simulated landscape. Artificial intelligence and synthetic biology help you to optimize and control habitats and species. In this experiment, you are invited to use DALL-E to create new animal, fungi, plant and robot variations and fly with them through a speculative ecosystem from the perspective of an AI agent.
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Download
Time to Nest Time to Migrate
Mobile App for Interactive Installations
With this 360° New Media Art Mobile VR App Time to Nest Time to Migrate you fly through your own inner world. What happens in there?
Bacteria, cells, fungi, parasites, phages, protists, prions, viruses communicate. Do they determine what we are?
Not scientific, but rather fake scientific, philosophical and emergency poetically. (We know that we know nothing, we know).
A little dance of life and death.
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YANTO – yaw and not tip over
Mobile App for Interactive Installations
YANTO – yaw and not tip over is a speculative piece on the future of aquafarming. The narrative sets in a speculative fish farm 30 years from now, where artificial intelligence and synthetic biology work together to create an optimized environment for farmed species. A simulator powered by artificial intelligence creates hybrid species to balance a delicate ecosystem in this imagined scenario.
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Versions in Comparison
| Mobile App | Released | Medium | Platform | Costs |
| 10.000 Moving Cities, Mobile App | 2018-ongoing | 360° New Media Art Mobile VR App | Android | CHF 350.- |
| 10.000 Moving Cities, AR | 2018-ongoing | Augmented Reality Mobile App, Single- and Multiplayer Game | Android and iOS | free* |
| Friends | 2019-ongoing | 360° New Media Art Mobile VR App | Android | free* |
| Me, Myself & I | 2018-ongoing | 360° New Media Art Mobile VR App | Android | free* |
| MORE AND LESS | 2020-ongoing | 360° New Media Art Mobile VR App | Android | free* |
| Nonplace | 2018-ongoing | 360° New Media Art Mobile VR App | Android | free* |
| Speculative Evolution | 2024-ongoing | 360° Medienkunst Mobile VR App | Android | free* |
| Time to Nest Time to Migrate | 2020-ongoing | 360° New Media Art Mobile VR App | Android | free* |
Exhibition Space
In the exhibition space, the mobile display can be projected onto one or more walls. As two mirroring projections, the image doubles kaleidoscopically.
Visitors can interact using smartphones or tablets and become performers. The animations and sounds follow the movements of the user: the virtual environment rotates when the user turns the device. The sky appears when the device is moved upwards. By tilting the device downwards, the floor appears. The virtual environment is endless and can be navigated in all directions. The sonic sound experiences are specially composed for the apps and respond to all these movements and navigation modes.
Material for one projection:
1x Android smartphone
1x sound systems
1x HD projector
Material for two projections:
1x Android smartphone
1x sound systems
2x HD projectors
1x HDMI splitter
Download 360° Mobile VR Art Apps in the App Store and Play Store
Install the apps and experiment with them on your smartphone or tablet.
Credits
Antonio Zea is an Ecuadorian research engineer. He resides in Germany and works in the fields of data visualization, robotics, and augmented reality. In 2017, he received his Ph.D. in computer science at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Since then, he has continued his research at the Intelligent Sensor-Actuator-Systems chair and is currently working for his habilitation.
Birgit Kempker is Swiss based poet. Research in the fields: word, image, sound. space, idea, concept and consciousness. Writes for art in art as art. Thinking drawings. Drawing words. Prose, essay, song, sound, radio plays. poetry, radio, collaborations, sphinx. mountains of MEANING as such. Research and teaching at University of Applied Sciences and Arts Basel (FHNW)
Florian Faion is a German research engineer, working in the fields of sensor data fusion and artificial intelligence. In 2015, he received the Ph.D. in computer science at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Since 2018, he is working at Bosch Corporate Research on deep learning based perception with application to automated driving.
Iris Qu Xiaoyu is a Chinese artist and technologist based in Brooklyn, NY, working at the intersection of software engineering and new media art. With code as her primary medium, her work engages with the speculative, political, and poetic aspects of technology. Her current research focuses on the hidden cost of optimization in machine learning systems.
Markus Kirchhofer is a Swiss freelance author since 2013. Before that he was a cultural mediator, teacher and adult educator. He writes poems, short stories, picture stories/comics, columns and plays. His literary work has received several awards, most recently a contribution from the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. His most recent publication: “aushub” (100 poems, Knapp Verlag, September 2018).
Shervin Saremi is an Iranian musician and audio-engineer, working in fields such as sonic computing, procedural sound design, and production. He has studied Electronic Production and Design at Berklee College of Music and is pursuing his research on immersive audio at Berlin University of the Arts (UdK).
The Intelligent Sensor-Actuator-Systems Laboratory (ISAS) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) deals with a variety of challenges in systems and state estimation including tracking, stochastic control, distributed estimation and telepresence.