AR Animation

Can Augmented Reality be used to create unique and memorable spaces for both shared and private emotional engagement? Utilizing Adobe After Effects and Adobe Aero we attempt to create three AR animations that incarnate three emotional states: joy, desire, and grief, in hopes of facilitating a moment of reflection for users who observe these three animations. This project is part of a larger exploration of ways technology can expand and facilitate spaces for emotional and spiritual reflection.

For this animation project I collaborated with Cat Dinh (Cat's blog) and Pedro Sodre (Pedro's blog). The animations we are creating will interact with a 3D-printed crystal that is part of an altar I am building for my second and third Physical Computing projects. Each character represents an emotional offering that can be left/engaged with at the altar. Cat is designing Joy, Pedro Desire, and I am working with Grief. We each designed our characters independently after setting some parameters: the form should be an abstract representation of the assigned offering and the sentiment of the offering should be communicated through its motion and gestures.

In creating an animation for grief I wanted to create something that felt like it was floating through space, moving with a slow almost ghostly presence. The coloring and layered opacity of the organism was also created with this in mind. Originally, I had wanted the animation to circle the crystal, but since the character itself is a 2D rendering I wasn’t sure how to make it turn in a realistic way. To the right is a prototype of the altar design. The crystal our sprites are animated around sits at the very top.

Moving the animations from After Effects to Aero was frustrating. The animation files are quite large, and while I was easily able to work with them on my computer, moving them to the Aero meant moving them to my cell phone which is not set up as a productivity space that can handle large files. I had to clear out a lot of space to get the app to accept my files. When I did finally get my files in Aero I could not figure out how to play them. Finding the menu to control your animations isn’t necessarily intuitive in Aero. And once I did find this menu it wasn’t obvious to me which settings I should be using for my file. My classmate Francisco clarified this, explaining that since all our animations were saved as PNG sequences, rather than selecting play animation, you need to select play images.

The last step in working with Aero was positioning the animations so they appeared to interact with the real world crystal in the way we had designed. This was difficult mostly because Aero is on the phone which is 1) a small screen to work with and 2) needs to be held up. For future AR projects where I’m relying on my phone as the main device I will probably put it on a tripod or stand so I can focus more on adjusting the settings and less on keeping the phone steady. I had my animation properly situated and it played smoothly once, but when I tried it again I could not get the phone to recognize the trigger even though I was holding it in the exact position I had before. I deleted the Aero file and started again. After this, I finally got the asset consistently playing.

Below are some screen recordings taken after I finally got Aero to accept my assets.

It was pretty cool to see my little character moving across the screen, but I also realized I would have animated him differently now seeing that the framing I relied on in After Effects had no relevance in the context of AR. Overall this was an interesting experiment. I’d be intrigued to experiment with other AR animations and other apps. I’d also be interested in experimenting more with Aero once a desktop version is ready to go; many of the problems I ran into seem to be based around the fact that my phone isn’t set up to be my main production tool and doesn’t have a plethora of storage and memory available for the large files needed for more than a simple AR project.

Grief, 2021 / Animated Asset and PLA Crystal / by Maya Williams

Joy, 2021 / Animated Asset and PLA Crystal / by Cat Dinh

Desire, 2021 / Animated Asset and PLA Crystal / by Pedro Sodre