AR Filter - The Compendium of Materia Medica

Filter_Weirui01
Filter_Weirui02
Filter_Lancao02
Filter_Lancao01

Inspiration

The Compendium of Materia Medica or Bencao Gangmu is a Chinese herbology volume written by Lishi Zhen during the Ming dynasty. It is well-known for the collection of Chinese Materia Medica before the 16th century. This book contains more than 1892 kinds of medicine, divided into different categories, as well as related to other disciplines such as biology, chemistry, and geography.

We draw inspiration from the herbology illustrations in this ancient book and try to combine them with contemporary fashion digitally. Digital head ac are designed according to the herb's morphology, growth, and functions. We'd like to bring various prescriptions of plants into the cultural dimension of herbal fashion headwear. The first two plants we choose are Weirui and Lancao.

What it does

It is an AR filter inspired by The Compendium of Materia Medica. We'd like to introduce some plants/herbs to people by showing them digitally. We implemented our interpretation of herbs and fashion, trying to show the organic and fluidity.

How we built it

We used blender and c4d to build the model from sketch and implemented it in Lens Studio.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge is the design of the head accessories. We tried to use a generative 3d surface plugin to make it look organic and fluid. But it is frustrating that the plugin brought many problems with UV mapping and exporting. And there are just a few tutorials and documentation of shader editing in Lens Studio.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We translated the shape of plants/herbs from traditional hand sketches from the book into organic models, and we presented tradition in a modern way with ar.

What we learned

We dived deeply into reading books, searching for herbs, and knowing their various aspects. And the most important is that we learned and tried to use emerging media to model cultural and historical storytelling, engaging people to participate and learn something from it.