PARADE TOWN is a public multimedia parade that uses augmented reality and computer vision to celebrate
the activity and expressions of downtown Los Angeles. The exhibition features custom augmented reality
lenses, physicalized Snapcodes, and digital simulations by students and faculty in ArtCenter's Media
Design Practices graduate and Interaction Design undergraduate programs.
GO CRUISING is an augmented reality “parade float” designed to occupy public space and passing cars with homosexual affection. It celebrates gay culture, sexuality in public, queer history, and calls attention to the erasure of it within Los Angeles history. From 1920 to the 1960s, Pershing Square, in DTLA, was at the center of what was known as “The Run,” a series of bars, parks, public restrooms, hotels, and bathhouses in close proximity to one another, and were well-known places for LGBTQ+ individuals to meet and socialize. In addition to cruising for sex, the park provided a space for activists to discuss social issues during a time when homosexuality and transexuality were illegal. In 1951 the park went through a variety of design changes in order to accommodate a parking garage, and as a result, the lush landscape was removed. This removal functioned as a form of crime deterrent, as the queer sexual contact prevalent in this space was illegal. This float nods to a time when gathering in secret was a necessity despite the serious risks to doing so. Unfortunately, it’s still a risk to display homosexual affection in public - it’s frightening to kiss, or even hold hands! This is because of widespread homophobia, toxic heteronormativity, and persecution that continues today. You can still see “No Cruising” signs directly linked to anti-homosexual efforts. GO CRUISING is designed to trigger when cars go “cruising by,” to occupy public space, and make room for gay affection once again in DTLA. Designed to celebrate gay affection, my work has been rejected repeatedly by Snapchat for its “sexual nature.” The censored design accepted by Snapchat calls attention to a culture which perpetuates sexual repression... Which is an eerie similarity to the historical attempts at erasing gay history and sexuality.
WeBox Delivery Parade is to celebrate the delivery systems in DTLA through augmented reality.
The parade imagines the city as a logistics factory, where streets function as conveyor belts and where everything can be packed into delivery boxes. By packing pedestrians, vehicles, even trees and buildings in the boxes, we would like to consider how DTLA and many other cities and towns are changing due to mass distribution centers.
Inspired by the Chinese family game Mahjong, The Luck Joy Parade celebrates random encounters and passing connections embedded in DTLA and in Chinese culture. The augmented reality game turns people into Mahjong tiles. When tiles from the same group are matched, you get points, turning public closeness into momentous events.
The Occlusion Layer: A Parade of Hidden LA History
Critic and historian Norman Klein calls Los Angeles a city of “erasures and collective
forgetting.” The Occlusion Layer employs Augmented Reality’s ability to reveal hidden
visual and sound experiences to explore histories of LA that are hidden under plaques in and surrounding DTLA. Through the Snapchat app or Snap Spectacles, viewers of The Occlusion Layer will discover AR “floats” made of paper that represent key
moments of hidden LA history:
- The 1871 Chinese Massacre, where a mostly white mob killed 19 Chinese
Immigrants—as represented by paper yuan bao (or gold ingots), set aflame as in
traditional Chinese funeral practice
- The forced eviction of Mexican immigrants from their communities at Chavez
Ravine in the name of urban housing development that never came to pass (but
made way for Dodgers Stadium)—as represented by Mexican crepe paper
flowers
- The 1967 demonstration against police brutality by the LGBT community at the
Black Cat Tavern in Silver Lake (one of the earliest LGBT demonstrations)—as
represented by paper protest signs
In my hometown, Miami, there is a large festival that occurs every year on ‘Calle Ocho’, celebrating the Cuban immigrants that fled to Miami after the Castro regime. Calle Ocho is Spanish for 8th street, a road full of its own history. Since moving to Los Angeles, I have noticed how little Cuban culture exists here. Not only do I miss it, but I want everyone to be able to celebrate ‘Calle Ocho’.
‘Los Manos que nos Cuidan’ is Spanish for ‘The hands that care for us’. In this phrase, I try my hands at celebrating those whose work often goes unnoticed, that are dear and personal to me. I am a Cuban from Miami with immigrants in my family who worked tirelessly to feed me, clothe me and care for me and everyone else in my community.
¡Gracias por todo lo que haces!
A Bubble in a Bubble parade uses augmented reality to peer into the world of golf, what happens on the course, and the secrecy that surrounds it. Golf courses have an enormous impact on our cities, especially in a drought ridden, Southern California. Whether that impact be from a physical part of the course, or the decisions and actions made by its members, they can no doubt be felt in a multitude of different ways. My floats address exclusivity, water usage and deals through the creation of a fictional Country Club in DTLA.
Some are unable to see what they are burdened with, some are overwhelmed by too many things, and some are lost on the road of life. Baggage is a parade that visualizes the weight that people carry as they are increasingly displaced, unhomed, and dislocated. In the world of augmented reality, participants will be able to see the weight that is typically overlooked. Please take care of your belongings, the parade will start soon. I wish you a safe journey.
Trash Rally considers garbage not a city problebut a part of the urban ecology that symbolizes a surplus value of daily objects. After being recycled by garbage trucks, the meaning of the trash's existence will be reinterpreted by other subjects, like nature and the recycling unit. Our parade focuses on the moment when disposed urban items are returned to the recycling process to fulfill their life cycles in city ecology. We see garbage trucks as the caller and the star of the parade to celebrate the important time of new value empowerment. The augmented reality parade, Trash Rally, will take place every time the truck starts to collect trash following its planned routine. When a garbage truck passes by, the parade starts. Use your phone to scan the truck and join the parade.
STREET by Street is a digital runway show of faster fast fashion. The concept is to create “fast fashion” directly from people on the street by collecting clothing datasets from different spots in downtown Los Angeles. The augmented reality lens makes you a model for its algorithmic remixes, layering the found DTLA clothing on your body.
Welcome to The You Parade, generating an augmented reality crowd of enthusiastic, celebratory versions of you. The You Parade: Crowd Creator invites you to participate in a series of joyful moments, where you can record yourself throwing your hands in the air, fist pump, applaud yourself, and jump up and down. Each moment projects these you-made crowd choreographies into a massive, surrounding float — turning DTLA into a cavernous, digital throng of celebratory motion.
For centuries, humans have been adapting nature to meet their needs. Plants are gradually decreasing, and green is replaced by reinforced concrete. But did you know that there are few things that can compare with the aesthetic impact that plants provide to the urban environment. Plants provide a huge visual appeal to the city and significantly enhance the streetscape. Use Grow Your Green, an augmented reality lens to imagine a regrowth of urban plants. This time, let’s join the plant parade! Together with your friends, grow the plants, and bring new colors to the city.
Coffee Shop Scooter augmented reality lens leverages the coffee shop design aesthetics of nearby Arts District to critique gentrification in the Gallery Row neighborhood of Downtown Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, and in other metropolitan areas of the U.S., coffee shops and art galleries are recognized as a symbol of neighborhood gentrification because of the resulting influx of middle-class people and tastes into poorer neighborhoods. Once a high-end coffee shop arrives in a low-income neighborhood, it has been studied that the subsequent rent increases displace the existing people in the community and the local culture slowly fades. Over time the neighborhood begins to resemble its neighboring successors and the effects of homogenization, influenced by the cultural dominance of social media, takes hold. In the end the essence of the neighborhood that originally attracted the coffee shop speculators is lost and the neighborhood explicitly expresses who is and who is not welcome. Therefore, this project seeks to prompt the user to reflect on the effects of gentrification and learn how to celebrate and bolster local neighborhood cultures so that heterogeneity continues to thrive in one of the most diverse cities in the world.
Using augmented reality, Euphoria repaints an undiscovered/overlooked DTLA alley into multiple rave “stages”. This AR experience encourages attendees to embrace the abandoned areas as community-making spaces imagining stages from chill and mellow electronic dance music (EDM) to hardcore techno music by overlaying effects and sounds on the scenes.
Do you ever feel that your life is surrounded by all kinds of bad luck? Parade Your Luck, is an augmented reality lens that transforms the city’s misfortunes through covering it with forms of luck. The project proposes a dataset of unlucky signs, triggering the camera to offset with lots and lots of luck. You will be excited to find out that you have created a parade that sows luck indiscriminately to the city of misfortune!
Morality and ideology are the invisible forces that can protect, unite, and or seed division.
Parade of Can___ Culture, is an augmented reality lens that proposes a surveillance giant that watches as it wanderers through a city. Through this representation of danger and destruction, the project questions the role of social media and the consumer camera. What role do you play within the system? A spectator? A manipulator? A victim? or a participant?
Benches and chairs are common public facilities in downtown Los Angeles, providing places for people to rest and relax. Since 2020, as the result of the pandemic, people’s lifestyles and ways of communication have changed dramatically. Many public areas in downtown Los Angeles have become empty, and other parts of the city have been left vacant by those who passed away due to Covid-19. Active Rest is a parade of resting to bring people’s states of relaxation back to the public areas of downtown Los Angeles and to remember those who passed away in the pandemic.
Action! Cut! Repeat!: All Choreographed by Hollywood of Loving Grace
Los Angeles has been exploited by the film industry, which has used the city as a white
canvas. Throughout its history it has been blasted, destroyed, underwater, rearranged,
turned into hell, paradise, taken back in time and to the future, disguised as other cities, and given back to nature. Through this active set, all genres have been enacted by countless actors and stories. All of these have generated a plethora of reactions, phobias and emotions onto viewers. LA has conditioned and choreographed the world we live in.
I have been influenced by this set, even before I had ever lived in LA. Multiple fictions coexist through my body. Action! Cut! Repeat!, is a parade in which an avatar version of myself is choreographed to play several gestures and scenes from different films that are based in LA and have had a huge impact on me.
All U Can Eat: A Parade of Fusion Cuisine Delivery
Inspired by the day-to-day food delivery and the food culture of Los Angeles — one of the most exciting food cities in the country that offers a diverse range of cuisines, All U Can Eat: a Parade of Fusion Cuisine Delivery celebrates digital-first food culture with the most outlandish visual amalgamations of foods. As the parade happens in augmented reality, All U Can Eat is proposing the impossible in reality but visually striking food types by mixing matching various food textures and forms. It’s a feast for the eyes featuring floats of pasta rice balls, full British breakfast ramen, burger roe sushi, fries with hotpot…etc., tethered on the cars. If you wave at the camera, you will receive free donuts & cupcake balloons with rice toppings. Wait until the end as the parade finishes off with condiments, curly fries, and utensils falling from the sky. Are you ready for the most mischievous remix of foods? Step out and join the parade!
Explore downtown Los Angeles in the 90s with Chick Hearn and hear his story of how he fell in love with the neighborhood that previously existed here. When many of us think of DTLA, we think of staples center, LA convention center, and skyscrapers. But did you know these spaces used to have a self-sustaining community? The reinvigoration of DTLA has cost over 250 residents lives and 100 businesses as they were forced to relocate to make space for the new Staples Center and LA Convention Center. Nostalgia is both a parade to celebrate the past of these locations and a protest against future gentrification efforts that do not take into account the lives and communities they affected.
A Parade of Leisure is an augmented reality lens that gives everyone a red balloon, distorting the typical urban scenes and rhythms of downtown Los Angeles. Awakening people’s nostalgia and anxieties, the AR lens offers people a feeling of subtle joy.
Pagodas, curved eaves, specific patterns, and colorful tiled roofs, Chinatowns share similar cultural and aesthetic tropes worldwide. Pagoda is well known for building top decorations in Chinatown; however, it was initially for Buddhism burial places and religious worshiping in Eastern Asia. Western architects built Chinatown with a misunderstanding of the cultural meanings behind the aesthetics. Unsurprisingly, Chinatown’s look never changed over a hundred years, and people with Chinese identity backgrounds barely find resonance. Connected Chinatown In-Progress invites people to use augmented reality to collage a rich imagination of “Chinatown” in DTLA. The purpose is not only for people with Chinese identity to find resonance but also for people with different identities to break their long-term associations to the Chinatown template. By randomly assigning three Chinese style components: Chinatown, modern China, and imagined future China, people can place and edit the components in one space. Creating, communicating, and sharing in a connected area encourages everyone to exchange and reflect their interpretation of Chinese culture.
The Circle Parade uses machine vision to identify circles located within a person’s environment. The augmented reality lens will lead the audience to recognize and observe the world around them from a simple form and overlooked detail.
It might be hard to think of our own bodies as habitats, but there are actually more things living in us than our cells: more than 39 trillion (1 trillion is 10^12) microbiota reside in and on our nose, skin, intestines, stomachs, etc. We are constantly evolving with our microbiome as an ecological unit to adapt to environmental changes: we are each other’s allies in most cases. Yet, due to microorganism’s invisibility to naked eye, we rarely recognize their existence and value. Quite often, we hold antagonism, fear, and disgust towards them. However, the fact is that the vast majority of human microbiota maintain a mutualistic relationship with human hosts, and even pathogens can coexist peacefully with healthy people. This parade of our invisible inhabitants puts forward an augmented reality view of the human microbiome in order to raise awareness to who they are, what their functions are, and how vital they are to our survival and health.
This parade celebrates DTLA as the entertainment capital of the world by playing a movie on the sky. This project aims to cross spatial limitations, strengthen the connection between people from all regions and invite them to join the celebration. Film has been chosen as a medium for the transmission of ideas across regions and languages to aid in the expression of concepts. By turning the sky into a curtain through augmented reality and machine learning, the movie can be played on any sky. Audiences from all regions are invited to look at the same sky and watch the same movie in different places at different times by using AR on their portable device.
Go Cruising
GO CRUISING is an augmented reality “parade float” designed to occupy public space and passing cars with homosexual affection. It celebrates gay culture, sexuality in public, queer history, and calls attention to the erasure of it within Los Angeles history. From 1920 to the 1960s, Pershing Square, in DTLA, was at the center of what was known as “The Run,” a series of bars, parks, public restrooms, hotels, and bathhouses in close proximity to one another, and were well-known places for LGBTQ+ individuals to meet and socialize. In addition to cruising for sex, the park provided a space for activists to discuss social issues during a time when homosexuality and transexuality were illegal. In 1951 the park went through a variety of design changes in order to accommodate a parking garage, and as a result, the lush landscape was removed. This removal functioned as a form of crime deterrent, as the queer sexual contact prevalent in this space was illegal. This float nods to a time when gathering in secret was a necessity despite the serious risks to doing so. Unfortunately, it’s still a risk to display homosexual affection in public - it’s frightening to kiss, or even hold hands! This is because of widespread homophobia, toxic heteronormativity, and persecution that continues today. You can still see “No Cruising” signs directly linked to anti-homosexual efforts. GO CRUISING is designed to trigger when cars go “cruising by,” to occupy public space, and make room for gay affection once again in DTLA. Designed to celebrate gay affection, my work has been rejected repeatedly by Snapchat for its “sexual nature.” The censored design accepted by Snapchat calls attention to a culture which perpetuates sexual repression... Which is an eerie similarity to the historical attempts at erasing gay history and sexuality.
WeBox Delivery Parade
WeBox Delivery Parade is to celebrate the delivery systems in DTLA through augmented reality.
The parade imagines the city as a logistics factory, where streets function as conveyor belts and where everything can be packed into delivery boxes. By packing pedestrians, vehicles, even trees and buildings in the boxes, we would like to consider how DTLA and many other cities and towns are changing due to mass distribution centers.
The Luck Joy Parade: A Parade of Mahjong
Inspired by the Chinese family game Mahjong, The Luck Joy Parade celebrates random encounters and passing connections embedded in DTLA and in Chinese culture. The augmented reality game turns people into Mahjong tiles. When tiles from the same group are matched, you get points, turning public closeness into momentous events.
The Occlusion Layer: A Parade of Hidden LA History
Critic and historian Norman Klein calls Los Angeles a city of “erasures and collective
forgetting.” The Occlusion Layer employs Augmented Reality’s ability to reveal hidden
visual and sound experiences to explore histories of LA that are hidden under plaques in and surrounding DTLA. Through the Snapchat app or Snap Spectacles, viewers of The Occlusion Layer will discover AR “floats” made of paper that represent key
moments of hidden LA history:
Los Manos que nos Cuidan
In my hometown, Miami, there is a large festival that occurs every year on ‘Calle Ocho’, celebrating the Cuban immigrants that fled to Miami after the Castro regime. Calle Ocho is Spanish for 8th street, a road full of its own history. Since moving to Los Angeles, I have noticed how little Cuban culture exists here. Not only do I miss it, but I want everyone to be able to celebrate ‘Calle Ocho’.
‘Los Manos que nos Cuidan’ is Spanish for ‘The hands that care for us’. In this phrase, I try my hands at celebrating those whose work often goes unnoticed, that are dear and personal to me. I am a Cuban from Miami with immigrants in my family who worked tirelessly to feed me, clothe me and care for me and everyone else in my community.
¡Gracias por todo lo que haces!
A Bubble in a Bubble
A Bubble in a Bubble parade uses augmented reality to peer into the world of golf, what happens on the course, and the secrecy that surrounds it. Golf courses have an enormous impact on our cities, especially in a drought ridden, Southern California. Whether that impact be from a physical part of the course, or the decisions and actions made by its members, they can no doubt be felt in a multitude of different ways. My floats address exclusivity, water usage and deals through the creation of a fictional Country Club in DTLA.
Baggage
Some are unable to see what they are burdened with, some are overwhelmed by too many things, and some are lost on the road of life. Baggage is a parade that visualizes the weight that people carry as they are increasingly displaced, unhomed, and dislocated. In the world of augmented reality, participants will be able to see the weight that is typically overlooked. Please take care of your belongings, the parade will start soon. I wish you a safe journey.
Trash Rally
Trash Rally considers garbage not a city problebut a part of the urban ecology that symbolizes a surplus value of daily objects. After being recycled by garbage trucks, the meaning of the trash's existence will be reinterpreted by other subjects, like nature and the recycling unit. Our parade focuses on the moment when disposed urban items are returned to the recycling process to fulfill their life cycles in city ecology. We see garbage trucks as the caller and the star of the parade to celebrate the important time of new value empowerment. The augmented reality parade, Trash Rally, will take place every time the truck starts to collect trash following its planned routine. When a garbage truck passes by, the parade starts. Use your phone to scan the truck and join the parade.
STREET by Street: A fashion show
STREET by Street is a digital runway show of faster fast fashion. The concept is to create “fast fashion” directly from people on the street by collecting clothing datasets from different spots in downtown Los Angeles. The augmented reality lens makes you a model for its algorithmic remixes, layering the found DTLA clothing on your body.
The you parade: crowd creator
Welcome to The You Parade, generating an augmented reality crowd of enthusiastic, celebratory versions of you. The You Parade: Crowd Creator invites you to participate in a series of joyful moments, where you can record yourself throwing your hands in the air, fist pump, applaud yourself, and jump up and down. Each moment projects these you-made crowd choreographies into a massive, surrounding float — turning DTLA into a cavernous, digital throng of celebratory motion.
Grow Your Green
For centuries, humans have been adapting nature to meet their needs. Plants are gradually decreasing, and green is replaced by reinforced concrete. But did you know that there are few things that can compare with the aesthetic impact that plants provide to the urban environment. Plants provide a huge visual appeal to the city and significantly enhance the streetscape. Use Grow Your Green, an augmented reality lens to imagine a regrowth of urban plants. This time, let’s join the plant parade! Together with your friends, grow the plants, and bring new colors to the city.
Coffee Shop Scooter: The Portable Gentrifier
Coffee Shop Scooter augmented reality lens leverages the coffee shop design aesthetics of nearby Arts District to critique gentrification in the Gallery Row neighborhood of Downtown Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, and in other metropolitan areas of the U.S., coffee shops and art galleries are recognized as a symbol of neighborhood gentrification because of the resulting influx of middle-class people and tastes into poorer neighborhoods. Once a high-end coffee shop arrives in a low-income neighborhood, it has been studied that the subsequent rent increases displace the existing people in the community and the local culture slowly fades. Over time the neighborhood begins to resemble its neighboring successors and the effects of homogenization, influenced by the cultural dominance of social media, takes hold. In the end the essence of the neighborhood that originally attracted the coffee shop speculators is lost and the neighborhood explicitly expresses who is and who is not welcome. Therefore, this project seeks to prompt the user to reflect on the effects of gentrification and learn how to celebrate and bolster local neighborhood cultures so that heterogeneity continues to thrive in one of the most diverse cities in the world.
Club Euphoria
Using augmented reality, Euphoria repaints an undiscovered/overlooked DTLA alley into multiple rave “stages”. This AR experience encourages attendees to embrace the abandoned areas as community-making spaces imagining stages from chill and mellow electronic dance music (EDM) to hardcore techno music by overlaying effects and sounds on the scenes.
Parade Your Luck
Do you ever feel that your life is surrounded by all kinds of bad luck? Parade Your Luck, is an augmented reality lens that transforms the city’s misfortunes through covering it with forms of luck. The project proposes a dataset of unlucky signs, triggering the camera to offset with lots and lots of luck. You will be excited to find out that you have created a parade that sows luck indiscriminately to the city of misfortune!
Parade of Can___ Culture
Morality and ideology are the invisible forces that can protect, unite, and or seed division.
Parade of Can___ Culture, is an augmented reality lens that proposes a surveillance giant that watches as it wanderers through a city. Through this representation of danger and destruction, the project questions the role of social media and the consumer camera. What role do you play within the system? A spectator? A manipulator? A victim? or a participant?
Active Rest
Benches and chairs are common public facilities in downtown Los Angeles, providing places for people to rest and relax. Since 2020, as the result of the pandemic, people’s lifestyles and ways of communication have changed dramatically. Many public areas in downtown Los Angeles have become empty, and other parts of the city have been left vacant by those who passed away due to Covid-19. Active Rest is a parade of resting to bring people’s states of relaxation back to the public areas of downtown Los Angeles and to remember those who passed away in the pandemic.
Action! Cut! Repeat!: All Choreographed by Hollywood of Loving Grace
Los Angeles has been exploited by the film industry, which has used the city as a white
canvas. Throughout its history it has been blasted, destroyed, underwater, rearranged,
turned into hell, paradise, taken back in time and to the future, disguised as other cities, and given back to nature. Through this active set, all genres have been enacted by countless actors and stories. All of these have generated a plethora of reactions, phobias and emotions onto viewers. LA has conditioned and choreographed the world we live in.
I have been influenced by this set, even before I had ever lived in LA. Multiple fictions coexist through my body. Action! Cut! Repeat!, is a parade in which an avatar version of myself is choreographed to play several gestures and scenes from different films that are based in LA and have had a huge impact on me.
All U Can Eat: A Parade of Fusion Cuisine Delivery
Inspired by the day-to-day food delivery and the food culture of Los Angeles — one of the most exciting food cities in the country that offers a diverse range of cuisines, All U Can Eat: a Parade of Fusion Cuisine Delivery celebrates digital-first food culture with the most outlandish visual amalgamations of foods. As the parade happens in augmented reality, All U Can Eat is proposing the impossible in reality but visually striking food types by mixing matching various food textures and forms. It’s a feast for the eyes featuring floats of pasta rice balls, full British breakfast ramen, burger roe sushi, fries with hotpot…etc., tethered on the cars. If you wave at the camera, you will receive free donuts & cupcake balloons with rice toppings. Wait until the end as the parade finishes off with condiments, curly fries, and utensils falling from the sky. Are you ready for the most mischievous remix of foods? Step out and join the parade!
Nostalgia
Explore downtown Los Angeles in the 90s with Chick Hearn and hear his story of how he fell in love with the neighborhood that previously existed here. When many of us think of DTLA, we think of staples center, LA convention center, and skyscrapers. But did you know these spaces used to have a self-sustaining community? The reinvigoration of DTLA has cost over 250 residents lives and 100 businesses as they were forced to relocate to make space for the new Staples Center and LA Convention Center. Nostalgia is both a parade to celebrate the past of these locations and a protest against future gentrification efforts that do not take into account the lives and communities they affected.
A Parade of Leisure
A Parade of Leisure is an augmented reality lens that gives everyone a red balloon, distorting the typical urban scenes and rhythms of downtown Los Angeles. Awakening people’s nostalgia and anxieties, the AR lens offers people a feeling of subtle joy.
Connected Chinatown in progress
Pagodas, curved eaves, specific patterns, and colorful tiled roofs, Chinatowns share similar cultural and aesthetic tropes worldwide. Pagoda is well known for building top decorations in Chinatown; however, it was initially for Buddhism burial places and religious worshiping in Eastern Asia. Western architects built Chinatown with a misunderstanding of the cultural meanings behind the aesthetics. Unsurprisingly, Chinatown’s look never changed over a hundred years, and people with Chinese identity backgrounds barely find resonance. Connected Chinatown In-Progress invites people to use augmented reality to collage a rich imagination of “Chinatown” in DTLA. The purpose is not only for people with Chinese identity to find resonance but also for people with different identities to break their long-term associations to the Chinatown template. By randomly assigning three Chinese style components: Chinatown, modern China, and imagined future China, people can place and edit the components in one space. Creating, communicating, and sharing in a connected area encourages everyone to exchange and reflect their interpretation of Chinese culture.
Circle Parade
The Circle Parade uses machine vision to identify circles located within a person’s environment. The augmented reality lens will lead the audience to recognize and observe the world around them from a simple form and overlooked detail.
Parade of the Human Microbiome
It might be hard to think of our own bodies as habitats, but there are actually more things living in us than our cells: more than 39 trillion (1 trillion is 10^12) microbiota reside in and on our nose, skin, intestines, stomachs, etc. We are constantly evolving with our microbiome as an ecological unit to adapt to environmental changes: we are each other’s allies in most cases. Yet, due to microorganism’s invisibility to naked eye, we rarely recognize their existence and value. Quite often, we hold antagonism, fear, and disgust towards them. However, the fact is that the vast majority of human microbiota maintain a mutualistic relationship with human hosts, and even pathogens can coexist peacefully with healthy people. This parade of our invisible inhabitants puts forward an augmented reality view of the human microbiome in order to raise awareness to who they are, what their functions are, and how vital they are to our survival and health.
The Sky Theater
This parade celebrates DTLA as the entertainment capital of the world by playing a movie on the sky. This project aims to cross spatial limitations, strengthen the connection between people from all regions and invite them to join the celebration. Film has been chosen as a medium for the transmission of ideas across regions and languages to aid in the expression of concepts. By turning the sky into a curtain through augmented reality and machine learning, the movie can be played on any sky. Audiences from all regions are invited to look at the same sky and watch the same movie in different places at different times by using AR on their portable device.
GRAMMY Rewind
GRAMMY Rewind is an augmented reality lens that turns everywhere into a red carpet.