de Youngsters

Bringing children's drawings to life for the deYoung Museum Art Party fundraiser

⁠— 2019

deYoungsters Art Party is an annual family fundraiser held for the deYoung art Museum in San Francisco. As one of the lead sponsers, Adobe was asked to create an activation for the event. With less than 30 days to make it happen, a small group of volunteer employess quickly assembled and got to work.

Inspired by several internal Adobe projects, we decided to try our own experiement in augmented reality and motion tracking. We were really interested in the concept of participatory design and getting the children involved in not just viewing, but contributing to the installation itself.

Concept pitch

Installation flow

Step 1

Child participants complete a butterfly coloring sheet. Each sheet comes with a special scanning code.

Step 2

The drawing is scanned and brought into Unity as the texture of a butterfly object. The wing pattern is repeated on both sides.

Step 3

Child poses with friends and family in a photobooth with their butterflies. Using live motion tracking, the butterflies land on participants' arms.

Step 4

All of the butterflies from throughout the party are collected in a second live environment broadcasted in the venue on the large screen.

Process

Building the scene

Step #1

 I created vector shapes in Illustrator, then added texture in Photoshop.

Step #2

Vlad, our 3D expert, reconstructed the scene in Unity, placing each item as layer in 3D space.

Step #3

James, our developer, added butterflies and lighting effects to the scene.

Credits

Lead Design

Kelly Hurlburt

Development

James Hurlbut

3D & Animation

Vladimir Petkovic

Producers

Lisa Pedee

Lisa Temple

Supporting Design

Beate Fritsch 

Silka Miesnieks 

Kim Pimmel

Photography

Martin Hoang

Additional Volunteers

Ramiz Sheikh

Geoffrey Oxholm

Amelia Waliany

Laura Herman

More projects

kelly.a.hurlburt@gmail.com

© Copyright 2019