In Summer of 2016 Occurrent Arts teamed up with Wildlife.la, Saatchi and Saatchi, and Toyota to create a fun cross-country drawing experience for the public. Toyota’s campaign “Lets Join Hands” was about connecting people in the most essential way, through markings and gesture.
We wanted to create a drawing system enabling people of any skill level to produce appealing images. Inspired by Adobe Flash's brush tool, which used smoothing to create clean vector lines, we developed a system that preserves soft curves and stylized lines, making it easy and fun to draw.
We were interested in how the visual of flocking birds could serve as a symbol for intuitive collaboration. Inspired by the erase sequences in KidPix, we developed an erase function where the drawn lines come to life, flock gracefully together, and gently fade away, leaving a clean canvas for new creation.
With no viable external solution, we discerned novel methods of linking the two user’s drawing surfaces and video feeds in realtime. [ By sending video differencing packets and drawing control messages via OSC over TCP sockets within a VPN ].
We modeled the initial connection experience after Skype and Google Hangout, trying, wherever we could, to tap into UX which the participants might already be familiar with. The client selected a number of drawing prompts to help guide the user interaction, playing with the experience of drawing on the other user to make the game more interpersonal. Along with developer-collaborator Ulysses Popple, Occurrent Arts was able to implement a custom interface for the large vertical touchscreen hosting the engagement, as well as a corresponding sound design to help round out the experience and make it feel more immersive.
Big tents were put up to host the experience. One in New York [ Herald Square ] and one in Los Angeles [ Hollywood and Highland ], and pedestrians and social influencers stopped by to play the drawing game with someone on the other side of the country.
