Oceanic Gown

Oceanic Gown
Lens Studio snapshot

My Inspiration

I live by the Pacific Ocean which is often the inspiration for my augmented reality work. So, when I began making fashion-themed Snapchat lenses I wondered how I might combine my surreal fashion aesthetic with imagery and ideas drawn from the ocean to produce a wearable fashion object that seemed both possible and impossible at the same time.

What it does

What I came up with is an AR fashion lens, 'Oceanic Gown' which tracks tightly to the user's body and moves fluidly with the body's movements. The gown-object consists of a long, billowing gown organically connected to animated tentacles, and an offset-belt rotating around the waist. The entire scene is designed to communicate the mysterious light and sound one might experience by being underwater in the ocean, with the gown following both the body and moving in ocean currents.

How I built it

'Oceanic Gown' was made using Snap Lens Studio, drawing on the software's ability to create realistic cloth physics, startling materials, and various optical effects. The 3D assets were developed in Blender, imported into Lens Studio and tightly tracked to the body which the lens augments.

Challenges I ran into

My challenges were mostly aesthetic rather than technical: some of Lens Studio's body tracking and clothing templates were extremely useful in setting up the basic structure of how the lens would operate, so the challenge was to construct materials and optical effects which captured the idea I had in my mind's eye. Many of these I solved by trial and error, using Lens Studio's material editor and VFX editor to produce a combination of colors and effects which matched what I was imagining.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm really proud of how the Lens operates on a technical level (it works extremely well on a variety of body sizes and shapes and tracks the body movements just as I'd hoped). Beyond that, though, the Lens has an implicit story or narrative which allows the user to participate imaginatively in a space that is usually inhospitable to humans, wearing a dress that is both human and trans-human at the same time. I love that leap of self-transformation.

What I learned

One of the main things I learned is that the technical abilities of the various Lens Studio elements are able to accommodate so many of my own visions, and that by pushing my own imagination into the surreal direction I love, there are many, many ways to adapt augmented reality effects in ways I hadn't intended but which often prove better than I initially thought.

What's next for Oceanic Gown

I anticipate that 'Oceanic Gown' will be part of a long series of AR fashion objects which will continue my exploration of surreal body and clothing transformations.