Augmented Reality Fine Art

"PARABOLA"

PIER 27 | SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA  |  2017

"Parabola" is an interactive, augmented reality mural created by Heavy Projects for San Francisco Design Week 2017 at Pier 27. The mural depicts a fractal background with a digital sculpture of a chair in the foreground built by impossibly interlocking and twisted parabolas. Fractals are useful in modeling structures and describe partly random or chaotic phenomena such as fluid turbulence that often expresses itself in parabolic shapes. A foundational design form, the parabola is found in everything from graphic design to product design to the sketches of DaVinci to natural forms. Users can "question" what they see by interacting with and investigating the chair form that simultaneously looks familiar yet strange, metallic yet organic. Additionally, interior designers can use the AR functionality to experiment with the scene by moving the chair to different parts of the virtual room, changing its colors, changing the colors of the wall fractal design and the lighting - and even exploding the entire design suite as a form of design protest.  And on the Pier 27 overhanging roof, we've embedded a microcosm of the galaxy as the ultimate high-ceilinged loft space for this living design.