Draw attention to detail and wow your prospective customers with projected AR retail displays.
LF2 is in it’s element with small intimate scenes such as this one. Easily draw attention to detail in less than 10 minutes using Lightform Creator and this sleek all-in-one AR projector.
Why drink in a normal bar when you can drink in another dimension?
When the team at Future Bars reached out to us to incorporate projected AR into their upcoming bar project, we had no idea how far they’d gone to curate the out-of-this-world vibe that is Zombie Village. We were excited to bring projection mapping in to further that effort.
We used two Optoma GT 1080 projectors with two LF1s to project some of Lightform Creator’s built in effects along with some additional custom animations onto their main wall and two 14′ hand carved Tiki Totems by Tiki Mora Mora.
We took Lightform’s renegade projection bike out for a spin to augment a HYBYCOZO sculpture at Patricia’s Green Park in San Francisco.
One of our favorite things to do at Lightform is to take our renegade projection bike out for a ride and create projected AR public art. We love the idea of rolling up to a sculpture, a mural, or park and temporarily transforming a public space into something new and magical.
Yelena Filipchuk and Serge Beaulieu, the artists who created the HYBYCOZO series, were hosting a party to celebrate the end of the sculpture’s exhibit in the public park. Serge and Yelena’s work is inspired by the intersection of math, science, technology, geometry, material, and light. A driving force behind their work is the desire to inspire others to make more public art.
“That’s the hope that we have for creating public art, to inspire people do the same, to do whatever their art is.” -Yelena Filipchu
We hope Lightform inspires people to create more augmented reality public art!
The Process
The Lightform workflow makes renegade projection easier than it’s ever been. You can roll up to any scene, scan it, and instantly start augmenting the scene with digital content.
We’re working on a ‘How to Build a Renegade Projection Bike’ tutorial (subscribe to our newsletter to be notified when we post it). But, you don’t need a projection bike to make public AR art. Power your projector using a generator or portable battery (like this Goal Zero Yeti 1400 Lithium Portable Power Station).
We chose the Epson PowerLite PRO G7905U for our project but you could also use a projector like the Epson HC1450. Mount the projector on a bike, tripod or c-stand.
Lightform scans the scene and gives you a Smart Scan – a pixel by pixel map of what the projector sees.
Then, you’re ready to to start creating!
Difficulty Hard
Projector Epson PowerLite PRO G7905U or Epson HC1450
Software Adobe After Effects
Hardware LF1, (LFC Compatible)
Creators Phil Reyneri, Ray Chang, Yelena Filipchuk, Serge Beaulieu
Lightform teamed up with Gemma O’Brien and Craig Winslow to create a projected AR mural for Lightform HQ. By combining pixels and paint, we created a whole new kind of experiential art with projected AR.
Gemma O’Brien (@mrseaves101) is an illustrator, artist, and typographer who is well known for her large-scale, hand-painted murals.
We’re big fans of their work and we wanted to get their feedback on Lightform. We also just wanted a really cool mural for our office.
We created Lightform in order to enable more artists and designers to use the projected AR medium. Lightform allows artists like Gemma to add moving visuals to their work without needing motion graphic skills and allows artists like Craig to spend more time creating and less time mapping.
Difficulty Medium
Hardware Epson L1500U or Epson G7500U LF1, (LFC Compatible)
Gabriel Schama is an Oakland, California based artist who makes intricate sculptures by layering laser-cut wooden panels. We partnered Gabriel with one of Lightform’s motion designers, Ray Chang, to add equally intricate projected AR designs to one of Gabriel’s latest pieces titled Pachamama. Lightform makes it easy to augment physical artworks like reliefs, sculptures, and paintings and with digital, AR content.
For this collaboration, Ray used Lightform’s After Effects plugin to stream a live preview of his animations to the LFC. This allowed Ray to see a real world preview of his After Effects composition projected on the sculpture as he was animating it. Live streaming from After Effects lets you see what your content looks like in the real world, allowing you to see how light reacts to objects in your scene as your are creating. Read more about how to use After Effects with Lightform creator on our guide here.
Lightform’s Smart Scan served as the background template which allowed Ray to easily author content, instead of having to animate on a black screen or manually warp a photo he took on another device.
Simona Bunardzhieva (simoneone) is a Graphic Artist, Illustrator, & Maker. She used Lightform to break her designs out of her sketch book and create an immersive AR photo booth à la 29 Rooms.
Designing Beyond 2D
“Normally my work lives in this 2D space, whether it’s in my sketchbook, or a screen, or a print – it was very exciting to do something that has a much more physical presence and becomes its own world.” -Simona Bunardzhieva
Projected AR & Motion Graphics Made Easy
“I haven’t done any projection mapping before because it always felt like it was this very difficult and complicated experience…I was very surprised at how easy it was to do with the pre-made Lightform effects.” -Simona Bunardzhieva
Empowering More AR(t)ists
“Lightform is definitely opening up new paths for artists like me to experiment.” -Simona Bunardzhiev
The Process:
Simona began by sketching each element of the underwater world.
The sketches were then vectorized and printed at human scale.
The prints were glued onto cardboard and the cardboard was laser cut. Cardboard stands hold the cut-outs upright.
To create the photo booth, we rented an Epson G7500U, which was ceiling-mounted in front of the scene. We used the Epson G7500U for this installation, which is an installation grade 6500 lumen projector. However, if the scene was a bit smaller or you are constrained by budget, the Epson HC1450 – a 4200 lumen projector – would also do just fine. The projectors can be mounted to the ceiling using this mount, ceiling plate, and extension pole. Or they could be mounted to truss.
Once the projectors were set up, Lightform scanned the scene using Lightform. Simona worked with an animator Ray to create content using Adobe After Effects.
Lightform partnered with Jeffrey Goodwin of Kilomade Studios and our favorite local bakery, vive la tarte, to create a menu-turned-art installation.
The three dimensional wooden slat design paired with a Lightform LF1 and an Epson L1500U laser projector provides vive le tarte with the flexibility and convenience of digital signage without looking anything like typical digital signage.
Turn your event venue’s staircase into a waterfall and more!
Use Lightform Creator’s library of effects and videos or bring in additional stock video to turn ordinary spaces into interactive experiences. Check out our guide article on adding content to Lightform Creator here for more information.
You may notice that the bottles in this scene are white. This helps to add contrast to the black background of the bar making this the perfect scene for Lightform’s visible structured light scanning. Having a lot of depth and color contrast in a scene will allow more disparity data to be extracted during Lightform’s scanning process. Lightform Creator provides vision assisted tools that leverage both RGB information and depth information from the scan.
The color and depth in this scene makes it easier to utilize Creator’s color-based and disparity based selection tools like magic wand and quick select. If the bottles were a darker color, the black background would have made it more difficult for Lightform to see the depth present of the bottles on the shelves. To learn more about getting a good scan, check out this article on our guide.
Create personalized monograms for events with Lightform Creator. For people who have animation skills and want more customized content, we recommend using your Lightform device alongside your preferred animation software. Learn more about how to bring custom animations into Lightform Creator on our guide here.