Sculpturoids is an interactive art installation mapping asteroids on a physical sculpture. projectors are used to project the game on the 2,6 meter high monolith, while the player can move around the sculpture with a wireless game controller. The university project at HAW Hamburg had several iterations with an Oculus Quest prototype, a standalone Windows build and the actual projection on the sculpture through three projectors.
Technology
The project was developed with Unity and makes use of some clever tricks to be able to render the objects on the sculpture with as little distortion as possible. All objects on the sculpture have a 2D spline representation that defines their basic shape. Additionally, each object has a pivot point mapped on the sculpture itself. From this pivot point, the mapping of the spline is started. Lines will break correctly at the edges of the sculpture and try to keep the shape as much as possible. The complete mesh is preprocessed beforehand to cache all relevant face, edge and vertex information to be easily accessible during runtime.
It built a custom physics simulation keeps the objects sticking on the sculpture and map the velocity directions at edges. To have more gradual changes, an invisible rounded variant of the sculpture mesh is used. The setup also includes three cameras that are set to the positions the projectors are placed in the real world relative to the sculpture. This way, there is no additional mapping logic involved, since the cameras record exactly what the projectors need to project onto the sculpture.
