Everchanging Cities
WILL YOU CHANGE YOUR POINT OF VIEW?
2022
What is Everchanging Cities?
Everchanging Cities is an immersive experience, a piece of digital art inspired by the reading of Italo Calvino's novel "Le città invisibili". The message to convey is the importance of point of view and perspective, a concept found in three of the cities described in the book and on which the project is based.
The change of perspective in a metaphoric and physical way is based on the user actions and mindset.
Perspective becomes a medium for self-reflection, in a visual interactive experience that carries and highlight dissonant thoughts.
City generation
For the images of the cities we tried with Stable Diffusion different models and different CFG scale values (A.I. freedom).
Since these images are meant to be seen from above, we specified for a bird’s eye view.
Valdrada
Despina
Ipazia
Example prompt:
<<aerial orthogonal view of an ancient roman bathhouse, intricate sprawling wacky wondrous mythic wonders architecture vista realm balconies terraces arches windows footbridges vivid chaos dreamscape philosophical splendor frenzied unbound intricacies neo-raphaelite fantasy artwork by Eddie Mendoza, Darek Zabrocki, Craig Mullins, Henri-Edmond Cross, fish eye lens>> Steps: 20, Sampler: Euler A, Seed: 1294472944
The experience
The user finds himself in a pitch black room, with an object suspended in the center of it. When approaching it, the object starts morphing.
The morph are meant to tell the story of the cities by their objects and their textures, in relation with each other. At the end of the experience the player can finally touch the mysterious object.
In the Unity project some scripts track the user's position in space. The environment is divided into six sections, each of which is linked to a different object. Moving from one section to another, the object undergoes a morphing and is transformed into an object connected to the corresponding city depicted in the center of the floor.
Another script instead tracks the direction of the user's gaze: based on the angle at which he observes the objects, they change their appearance by modifying the applied texture (created with Stable Diffusion), which interpolates with the new one to make the change smooth.
Heart
Glass - Tubes - Spider webs
Dagger
Water - Buildings - Maze
Vessel
Attorneys - Clowns - Trash
Camel
Manhole - Smoke - Water
Magnolia
Words - Faces - Skulls
Corpse's hand
Rotten bodies - Carpet - Space nebula
Used tools
Unity
As development platform.
Blender
To create 3D assets and environment.
Meta Quest 2
As device.
Stable
Diffusion
To generate images and textures.
Flowframes
To interpolate textures.
Unity
As development platform.
Blender
To create 3D assets and
environment.
Meta Quest 2
As device.
Stable Diffusion
To generate images and textures.
Flowframes
To interpolate textures.