Animistic Collaborators in Mixed Reality

This summer I’m conducting a research project on new approaches for AI in a Mixed Reality context. The project, extends my work with Animistic Design, but takes a different approach to AI embodiment, using the integration of virtual AI entities with “Real Reality.”

I’m working with five ArtCenter students from our Media Design Practices program: Stephanie Cedeño, Xing Lu, Godiva Reisenbichler, Nan H Tsai, Nicci Yin.

Note: The project completed summer of 2017. Initial work is summarized here: 

cargocollective.com/anicollab/

Project Description

This 2017 summer research project will explore how AI based, non-anthropomorphic animistic entities could work as colleagues and collaborators in Mixed Reality.

These collaborators will work with people and each other in the mixed reality environment by conversing, building and modifying virtual things, communicating with the real world, representing external data, and otherwise behaving as members of a mixed reality ecology. This project leverages the distinct affordances of 3D mixed reality, which will allow these AI driven systems to manipulate and participate in the virtual world in a dramatic way, unconstrained by physics, cost, or the flatness of small screens.

Potential domains for these MR collaborations include architecture and urban planning, product design, scientific visualization and exploration, film production design,  creative work, and many other fields. Animistic collaborators could build and modify objects, run simulations, present competing “physical” proposals side-by-side, and so on.

This project builds in my prior work in animistic design, taking it in a new, more participatory direction, where the collaborators actively work in, and change three dimensional worlds.