The Arc Project is a series of five 3D scanning booths scattered throughout the city of Bristol, reminiscent of familiar photo booths, yet instead of getting a photo, people can enter and get 3D scans of themselves or an object. Just after the 3D scanning, 3D models of visitors’ bodies or objects are uploaded on the web and placed into an augmented reality landscape of the location they were taken at.
At the site of each of the booths, there will be installed a “viewport”, an iPad station with 360degree rotation, through which visitors will be immediately able to observe the augmented reality landscape around them. This is reminiscent of the classic viewports which you look through to see cities.
Visitors will also be able to download a phone app and view the world through the screen of their personal mobile devices or in an online web application of the project, so the augmented reality landscape can be viewed from anywhere in the world.
The Arc Project accumulates, conserves, and offers the experience, of physical forms in the virtual world, creating the city’s augmented reality museum of life. The virtual 3D space becomes an actual venue, on top of the pre-existing landscape of Bristol, where forms of its visitors have been captured and eternalized, by amassing 3-dimensional forms that pile up on top of each other and can be experienced in full volume and size. It is the aim of The Arc Project to preserve the experience of the physical forms in the digital/virtual world.
The project also examines the idea of collection, archivation and ownership both in the physical and virtual world. The creation of the virtual space that archives physical objects makes the objects in this space, as well as the space itself, a locale that cannot be claimed, but is universal, making it the first “real”, un moderated democratic public space.
The project will be installed around the city of Bristol for a duration of a month, after which a curated exhibition of 3D printed sculptures will be made of selected 3D models that were created during the process.
This Playable City Award is brought to you by:
Floating Point, an artist’s collective based in Brooklyn, New York. They are Gabriella Levine, Kyle McDonald, Ivana Basic and Jack Kalish