Flux Garden

VR Experience

Interactive room-scale VR experience | 2020
Viewed on tethered VR headset (HTC Vive Pro or Quest 3)
Directed by Benjamin Seide
Produced by Elke Reinhuber
Sound Design by Ross Williams

UE4 artists: Cho Wei Li Justin, Zaid Salihin

The room-scale VR experience Flux Garden is a poetic reference to a former Chinese Garden in Singapore. Spatialised music compositions accompany the spirits of dancers and turn each walk through the impressionistic dream-like landscape into an individual and unique experience.

The conceptual background is based on the observation that many of the impressive tropical trees had to make room during construction of the new garden. In our interpretation, abstract dancers symbolise a reincarnation of the logged trees, most of them hiding in grave-like caves. The abstract landscape of roundish caves are fragments of the trees based on their 3D reconstruction from photogrammetry with insufficient data. The environment is the result of experiments combining abstract and realistic elements, leading us to merge a low-resolution 3D reconstruction with our accurate re-creation, resulting in an impressionistic dream-like memory of the garden.

This research has been made possible through the kind support of an MOE grant in Singapore and ADM, School of Art, Design and Media, NTU Singapore.

Watch the video documentation on YouTube

Seide, B., Reinhuber, E., & Williams, R. (2021). Flux Garden—a Poetic Memory of a Lost Garden in VR. 190-191. Art Machines 2: International Symposium on Machine Learning and Art 2021 (AM2), Hong Kong, China.

Reinhuber, E., Seide, B. & Williams, R. A. (2024). Different Layers of Reality. A Retrospective Evaluation on diverse possibilities for digitally preserving memories of the Yunnan Garden as an Immersive Experience. In Proceedings of the 29th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2024)