We would like to put focus on the art in the streets in cities. Those beautiful art pieces and sculptures that decorate our cities and which you often just pass by without noticing.

Combining photogrammetry technique and creative graphics design with video editing, we managed to create a few small episodes for some of the interesting work in public.

Each sculpture is unique with great history that we thought was worth documenting. Here is a sculpture of the Aalborg Cannon that originates way back from 1726.

You can find more episodes from the City Sculptures series in this playlist:

youtube.com/watch?v=NmmH9Ng-pNg&list=PLLmOlkcmu7_E7EhTHTBS15tMcmstDDEPm

During our attendance at the Impact Jam 2018, we met a lot of important and creative people from the film, game and media industry. We listened to talks from Amy Kalson from Sybo Games talking about crafting the future of technology with deep thought and care, Milan and Dario - creators of the VR tool for immersive storytelling  AnimVR, and many others.

We also managed to join other creatives to create the game Plastic Paradise, a good contestant to our other game OctoTrash. Following the same theme of "Mind the Ocean", Plastic Paradise aimed to be a game with a great story that could be easily shared on social media to grab people's awareness on the problem of plastic pollution.

In Plastic Paradise, the player was set to be a plastic bottle that has to swim through the ocean without getting caught by the boat cleaning up plastic from the ocean. On its way to the paradise, the plastic bottle meets fishnets, and in order to go through, it has to decompose in small pieces. However when it decomposes, it has to be careful, so it does not get eaten by sea animals. On its way to the paradise - a huge plastic island, the plastic has three chances, and once used up before reaching the paradise, the game starts from beginning, racing through the ocean again.

Playing the Plastic Paradise makes you wonder how long a journey plastic can manage to travel through damaging the ocean life and how impossible it can be to get rid of. As a player you are put on this journey to understand the problem of ocean pollution and the long lifetime of plastic decomposition, which is dangerous for the nature. Our intention with the game was easy distribution and a great story that could touch millions online. Here is a picture with the team behind Plastic Paradise, starting with Rovango's very own Denisa, Antione, Morten, Heleno.

We were happy to join the Animation, VR & Games for Impact 2018 Conference and Jam at The Animation Workshop in Viborg. There were talks from artists like Teodore Ushev from National Film Board of Canada, Reza Riahi - the Art Director for the Oscar nominated animation film Breadwinner, and Liam Walsh from Nexus Studios, who talked about the role of reality in Augumented Reality. After the conference, there was also Impact jam with the theme of "Mind the Ocean", where we at Rovango Studio got to contribute with our knowledge in Virtual Reality and Games.

Several creatives from various media branches joined together to create solutions using new media to bring more awareness to the problem of Ocean Pollution. Rovango members joined two teams with one of the teams creating an immersive VR game "OctoTrash" that won the jam! :)  Check out the OctoTrash Team - Sule, Basile, Anna, Costin - annouced as winners for the Impact Jam.

In OctoTrash, we put the player into the body of an octopus, who had to clean the trash falling to the bottom of the ocean. Using HTC Vive controllers, the player controlled the tenticles of the octopus to pick up trash and release it in the trashcan.

OctoTrash showed to be very immersive and people that played it, could not stop playing. Our VR game made it a lot of fun to embody the sea creature's body, and understand how challenging it can be to fight to your best to have a clean home in the ocean. 

Being part of the Impact Jam was a wonderful experience and the combination of creating sustainable change was very inspiring. Something we definitely will do more of in the future. :)

We love being creative, this time we took the challenge to write and illustrate a childern story about Tim who is preparing to join Mark on the football field. We are proud of how it turned out with all its colors. Enjoy and find us also on our Behance!! 

. . .

 

 Read it also on our Behance

Check us out on our Behance page

Check us out on our Behance page

Design for an e-commerce application that was to be presented on mobile virtual reality headsets. The UI surrounds the user in 360 degrees. The design for the UX of virtual reality shopping included interaction with the viewed product and menus.

UI/UX design

The view in the app

Logo design

Product modelling

Check out our Behance page

A UX/ UI graphical project for a bolig portal, the goal was to make a membership brand and site that was easy to sign up, and use when searching a new home. 

Check out our Behance page

Two augmented reality guides built for an exhibition to tell the story of art hanging on the wall in an architectural museum

Problem:

Museums often offer self-service guides, such as written descriptions or audio guides, for visitors to provide an overview of what a specific artwork is about. However, these guides lack a way to link between what is presented in them and the actual artwork, and therefore it can be challenging to know which part of the artwork is being referred to. 

Task:

Use smartphones and Espon Moverio smart glasses to create an augmented reality modern state of the art guide. The guides had four main features:

• Tell stories of the art hanging on the wall
• Pointing arrow that shows where to look during the story
• Users can select content in the exhibit to learn about
• A game to allow users to play with exhibit

Experience used:

UX/UI design, Graphic design, Project Planning, Development and User testing. 

Here is a short video demostrating the guides 

Djembe Bwana is a cultural project that came around from our interest in traditional music, djembe drumming, and animation. The music and rhythm alone tell a story of a drummer experimenting with his instrument and presenting his master skills to an audience gathering around. Throughout, we tried to keep the animation style and character simple, focusing on the key movements and gestures that portray the drummer's musical personality.

During the concept design and creation process, we tried several ideas, where the drummer kept changing the looks, and style, or the medium itself was getting a gamified feel. The following renders and illustrations show a few of the concepts, where the first image shows a 3D model of the drummer that can be rotated around using the left mouse button to see the drummer from different angles.

Drummer render

Drummer concept

Gamified drummer concept

We had a lot of fun with designing and making our last 360 panorama of Toldbodpladsen in Aalborg, and therefore we did it again. This time with another famous turist location of the city, a few meters from Toldbodpladsen. Like before we again followed the simplification path, and are pretty proud of the result. You can explore the panorama on our facebook page here.

360 Panorama

Stylized Utzon Center

Greybox

Concept drawing

From concept to completion. In this project, we wanted to challenge ourselves with making 360 panorama pictures that can run on facebook's 360 technology. We also wanted to take a realistic area and simplify it while still making it recognizable. Here are shots for how the work progressed from concept drawings to finish. Check out our facebook page here where you can try out the 360 pictures showing a beautiful location in Aalborg city - Toldbodpladsen.

360 Panorama

Toldbod pladsen 3D scene render

Greybox

Concept drawing

Have you ever tried to use a self-service guide when you were visiting a museum? The ones often available are audio guides and text descriptions on the walls. In this project, we tried to make the guides a bit more fun through use of augmented reality a letting you click on different elements in a painting, so you can easily discover the painting's story. You can check it out in the video recording :)

To try out our guide, we picked a famous painting called The Ambassadors, which is hanging in The National Gallery in London. It was painted by Hans Holbein, who really gave it a rich story, and also added this anamorphic distorted skull that is sitting under the ambassadors' feet. All of it is shortly explained in the guide that can be used either on a smartphone or on smart glasses similar to the Google Glass. Both of these devices can be easily carried around during a museum visit, it's just up to the preference and availability.

When we were making the guide for The Ambassadors, it was important to design how the visitors could interact with the painting and chose to hear about the elements that they have interest for, but at the same time get a full story of the painting. Inspiring ourselves from theories in the field of interactive storytelling, we believe we found the balance and the guide can give the people a satisfying and creative experience.

Another feature we experimented with was guiding people's attention to what the audio explanation is about. After different tries, we added a pointer with a playful glowing tail. It flies around and takes them through the guidance. This same concept was taken on to develop augmented reality for Utzon Center, a local museum to present stories of artwork that the conductors of the museum set. Augmented reality has potential and we won't be left behind for exploring its future.

Here is one of our experiments on bringing art to life. In this short film, we looked at Aalborg's bull - a famous statue in the city center and recorded a few videos. Then we modelled and textured the bull, so one cannot clearly tell which one is the original statue :) After animating him, he can now dance and show off his moves to the public.

Behind the scenes, the original bull had to be removed from the video recordings, and the dancing bull was placed at the same place through use of camera tracking in Blender. This gave us some challenges especially when a bus was passing by and covering the bull.

Making the bull look right and move required many tryouts, but in the end reached a good result. Here is one the renders at the beginning. See how the bull changed since.