Gallery

Concept / Painting: Paul Nicholls

Virtual Cities is an Art installation, initially constructed at The Factory Gallery In London. It exists both physically and virtually. Physically itís a formation of foam blocks which you can walk around and sit on. Itís assembled in the form of a simplified blocky cityscape. Virtually itís an immersive digital painting which overlays the exact position of the physical blocks using tilt brush.

We used the HTC Vive to scan the space, giving an accurate position of the blocks visually within Virtual Reality. The result is that you can touch the physical space from within VR as you would normally. Giving you a sort of haptic feedback and connection to the real world.

Our Creative Director Paul Nicholls then painted an abstract cityscape over the course of two weeks on top of the blocks in VR. There is a sense of surprise and wonder when people first put on the headset and the bland grey blocks transform into a vibrant, intricate cityscape. Both the painting process and the resulting artwork was projected onto the gallery wall as a form of visual theatre.

The digital painting from VIrtual Cities can be downloaded straight to the vive and through desktop, through sketchfab