BCAD - Jmill & Lucy Qiu

Let's see. Thank you. There we go. Hey, everybody. My name's Heather.

I'm an immersive artist. I'm just going to play through this and talk over it a little bit, and then very casually just sort of step you through some of the projects that I've done in the last few years. I live in the Pacific Northwest. We have a lot of waterfalls. That's what that's from.

Let's go ahead and press play. So I started out actually as a songwriter, painter, and playwright. So I'm really interested in stories. And then I got into computers sort of in coincidence, and I realized that there was this new type of story that I could tell that actually integrated the audience in like a meaningful way. And this was actually the evolution of storytelling.

So that's what I began to explore. And basically XR combines all of those things that I like to do and also sort of allows the audience participation and this new use of context, which I find kind of fascinating. So here's just a sampling of some of the projects that I've been working on for the last few years. So I originally was an interactive designer out of college. So I did a bunch of websites and games, and games actually is where I ended up mostly.

I was an art director. And then a few years ago, I discovered that the XR software landscape had totally changed, and that I could suddenly make experiences completely on my own without needing a team of developers. And so I just dove into that, because I do code, and so I'm this weird kind of hybrid of artist and technician. So yeah, so I've been in XR for about five or six years now. And it's been a wild ride, I can tell you that.

So I started experimenting initially, Adobe found me and I began to be an AR art resident for them. So I got to explore what you could do sort of in this new space because they were like, hey, we make this software, we want to make cool things and we need to hire people to make cool things. So I was lucky enough to be one of those people. And here are some of my early experiments with some of the headsets as well. So I was one of the first cohorts that got access to the Snap Spectacles, but there's lots of people now that have had access, including Nico, what, what.

And this is one of the first pieces that I did. So I am a musician. As you can tell, I'm wearing a lot of hats. I'm basically interdisciplinary. I'm kind of fascinated with all sorts of things, and I let my curiosity kind of guide me.

So in my 20s and 30s, I was a traveling musician, so I did touring, all that sort of stuff, released albums, etc. And so I'm specifically interested in sort of spatial sound, like what does it mean to have a song in space? What are these new ways that we can interact with sound and create a visual environment? So I sort of have light synesthesia and I use songwriting. When I songwrite, I actually think in colors and shapes.

And so I've been kind of trying to create that for other people and also sort of expand music making to people that don't have like technical instruction in playing an instrument because that takes so many years. But making music is very human and it's very gratifying, and I want other people to experience that. So one of my first pieces was what I called The Door, which is a spatial song which was built for spectacles. And essentially what it does is it actually combines a series of different types of interaction, both proximity and hand gestures, where you're exploring this space. So you walk up to the sculpture, it responds to you, and then you sort of go and discover this world where you can use hand gestures to change the song in real time.

Yeah, so they're actually controlling the experience very specifically. This is when you get transitioned to the new world, and you sort of unlock all of these new capabilities. The whole thing is interactive, all the little bits and pieces. There's different sound effects and elements. So this is one of my first pieces for Spectacles, which was pretty fun.

The hand gesture and the hand tracking stuff has gotten way better. If anybody has experimented with that recently, the latest spectacles in particular are pretty dope at it. So I brought some. I know Nico brought some. If you guys want to experiment during the residency, I'd be more than happy to show you how to do it.

Here's another piece that I made for Snap Spectacles. I was trying to create basically a mini game which would run on their glasses. And so I came up with this concept called the Future Garden, which you're essentially in a parallel universe. You're introduced to this main character who sort of leads you through this magical kingdom where you use not only hand gestures but also voice ML so you can speak to it and it will actually unlock specific things. So the purpose is the space bees basically need to, they're running out of food and you need to basically plant these magical seeds, which grow these magical flowers, which give you specific special capabilities.

And then at the end, you basically create a large enough garden that the space bees can all populate and gather. Anyway, here's an example of using the hand gestures again. And when you plant one of these flowers, like I said, each one actually gives you a special capability. So I use single-plane tracking, which basically allows you to scan surfaces in real time and then interact with them. So this one in particular gave the ability to basically plant flowers on the ceiling or the walls or wherever you want, essentially, basically creating your own world.

This is just a little behind the scenes. Here's another one that I made. This is not for spectacles. This was just on Lens Studio. And it's called The Mini Black Hole.

So I wanted to create basically a really simple cathartic experience where people could banish things, like give them the actual experience of being able to send something into the depths of a black hole. So it actually detects your voice, you speak, it will then create whatever you've spoken, and it banishes it into the black hole never to be seen again. It's very simple. It's pretty fun. It's also silly.

Here's another one. This was for Coachella that I made last year. So this is an audio reactive flower, like a desert flower. Give you some... let's see actually I'll play this one instead.

So desert flower, give you some, let's see, actually I'll play this one instead. So Coachella is like a desert festival. You guys have probably heard of it. And it's basically, I wanted to create something that emulated the desert sky and sort of the changing coloration of the desert sky. And I also wanted to create something that was audio reactive so that as people are watching their concert, their music, whatever, the flower is actually responding in real time to that or if they're singing along or like whatever it is.

So this is also time-based. So depending on, this was part of a scavenger hunt, and whenever they found that particular flower, it would be, it would greet them in a particular way, and it would have a specific shape, and it would also have a specific material, and then would respond with audio in a particular way. And then if you happened to find this flower right around sunset, you would actually get this special light show edition, you know, kind of like a laser light show at a concert or something like that. Yeah, so that one was kind of fun. And then we'll wrap up and just talk a little bit about this.

So this was Crossroads. You guys are probably familiar with SUTU, right? Cool. SUTU is really neat. And he and his iJack company created this new MR tool, which essentially creates these cubes, which can contain MR objects within them.

They can also be collected as NFTs. And I made a piece, which was released at AWE a couple years ago, called Crossroads. And it was kind of just a very simple before and after of sort of, like, if we could... I was sort of positing the question like, what if we were actually able to have a mutual relationship with nature in which we took the lessons that it can teach us and we applied that along with our technology to make a better world? Or what if we totally ignore that and we let capitalism drive the bus?

So this particular cube has two different realities that you can play with. And you can view this either in VR or AR if you want. Here I'll show you some of the elements. So of course, this is the industrial one. And essentially, each one of these contains sort of a world within a world.

They're interactive. Each of the little elements you can sort of experience. We have the overlords sort of watching the industry and consuming everything. And then it just closes up again. So of course that's the topic one.

And here's an alternate version. So I am a nature nerd, which you'll see in a lot of my work. I moved to the Pacific Northwest so that I could actually have a relationship with the old growth forests that are out there, which are kind of intense and amazing. It's like a rainforest that's on the coast of the U.S.

And so nature is like a big theme in all of my work. And yeah. So you'll see that I'm probably going to include some of that in my residency as well. Although I'm still figuring that out. But we'll talk.

So anyway, that's enough for