vassiliskrikonis / falling-follies

Falling Follies

An interactive experience on the browser, where the user can play with architectural archetypes in a digital context. Submitted for the Processing Community Day 2024 Open Call under the theme "Ludic Aesthetics".

Team

• Vassilis Krikonis
• Maria Paneta

Abstract

Humans have always been curious to interact: we invite users to interact with architectural archetypes in an archetypal behavior. This is a game and we choose to go a bit crazy.

We created an interactive webpage that mimics the built environment (gravity, physics), and uses archetypical structures in a digital context. This is an interactive environment, where the user can play: turn, add, lift, drop non-material digital structures in a space where no physical rules exist. Gravity exists for some structures, whereas others fly to the sky forever. A huge mirror plate reflects all the ludic action and the user may start-over in endless combinations.

Architectural structures with custom textures are digitally designed. They are then available as a WebGL experience for the browser, using react-three-fiber (three.js) for the 3d and rapier for the physics.

Description

When considering the role that Ludic Aesthetics plays in fostering computational and coding innovation, our thought goes to bright interactive in-between spaces where the boundary of the digital and physical is vague. Playfulness can elicit novel and erratic aesthetics that lead to the creation of new realities, representations, and radical bodily expressions. In our case, we pick architectural, historical and bodily archetypes, place them in a digital context, aka a web page under an ever-blue sky, and let the user interact with them.

Each structure enacts a designed interaction: the arches & columns fall down because of a gravity simulation, the pillars fly to outer space and the pearl balls pulse and hit their surroundings. The user can play and trigger the architecture in a different way in each game round. We see this non linear combo of possibilities as a means of navigating in a ludic experience.