Creating Art.

The world is your canvas

Home Screen

The landing page of Scapes serves as a viewfinder into the augmented world by using the phone’s camera with a minimalistic, material design UI. At your fingertips, you can access the discovery map, collaborate with your friends see your profile or start creating art.

Creation Tool

The core of Scapes presents you with a toolbelt that follows you around and can be seen with a small down tilt of your phone, providing easy access while not obstructing your view. You can use it to select primitive shapes, base models organized in categories, particle effects, saved assets or access Google’s Low Poly library for more. The toolbelt can be expanded with the use of tabs, and categories can be customized under your profile.

Editing Tool

With one or multiple objects selected, the user can pinch to scale them, hold the finger and move around to rotate, or select one of the various functionalities on the sidebar. Those include moving the object, grouping or un-grouping them, duplicating it, deleting it, changing its color, attaching sound, adding gravity or creating a motion path for it to follow.

Collaboration

With few taps, the user can host a collaborative art session and invite friends or join existing ones that are being hosted by their friends or in public mode. The users’ avatars serve as a stand-in if they are not in the same location and highlights indicate the sections they are working on. When collaborating, new tabs show in you toolbelt, giving you access to the models your fellow artists have on their own toolbelt . A readily accessible mic button allows for communication.

Going Live

While creating your art, be it solo or collaboratively, you can start live-streaming at any moment for people around the world to view and react to it. You can get notified if people live-stream works using your art or if your friend starts one, or you can simply search for them using certain filters.

Share Map

After you are done creating your art, you can use the share map to place it anywhere in the world or, conversely , let it sit exactly where you created it for context-dependent art. When placing your art, you can make it public, friends-only or leave it for a specific friend to find, as well as change the settings whether people can save it as an asset or add to it.

Discovering Art.

Discover. Collaborate. Repeat.

Discovery Map

Accessible from the home screen, it shows everything that surrounds you in the augmented world of scapes. Icons represent live-streams or collaborations you can join physically or remotely, while the abstract art represents undiscovered art that has been placed on the physical world - we call them Easter Eggs. After finding it, the abstract is replaced with the actual artwork. You can use filters to decide what shows up in your map to avoid clutter and customize the experience. Scrolling down on it, leads you to the live-streams.

Discovery of Easter Eggs

Either by notification, tracking through the map or randomly walking up on it, your home screen is your viewfinder into the augmented world of scapes, and lets you find Easter Eggs others have placed in the world. They are silhouetted while undiscovered, but after you tap on them, they gain their colors and come to life, playing any animations, particles or sounds they may have.

Adding to a Easter Egg

After an Easter Egg has been found, the user can save it as an asset to use in its own creation or add onto the Easter Egg itself that they’ve just found. By clicking the “add” button, the creation tool initiates with the current Easter Egg as a base for the user to keep building on top and add as much or as little as they feel comfortable with.

Easter Egg’s Timeline

As people start adding to an Easter Egg, it generates a timeline that users can scroll through and see how the art has evolved overtime. Although you always add to the latest version of it, any previous version can be saved as an asset or reported, in case of offensive content. An Easter Egg, by default, disappears after three days, but the countdown is reset whenever someone adds to it. If constant contributions are made, the counter keeps extending until the Easter Egg becomes permanent and an enduring example of the artistic expression of a community.

Future Opportunities.

An ever-expanding landscape

Coca-Cola x Scapes

Coca-Cola would partner with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to connect communities in the fight against global warming with the help of Scapes. To activate the campaign, holiday themed Coca-Cola bottles would be released to raise awareness of the melting climates portraying dismal the dismal truth. These bottles can be scanned into the Scapes app, where new content will become available based on the bottle that’s scanned. Every time one of these assets is placed, it will spread the magic of winter by creating a snowscape inside the AR plane. The goal is to have the whole world be covered, because each square foot of “snow” generates a dollar for the WWF.

Partnerships

Scapes offers the possibility of a new and untapped advertising platform, Unlike pre-existing social media heavy applications, which exist solely online, features within Scapes require its users to be physically present, exploring its contents in actual reality. The greatest opportunities for advertising, however, lie within the challenges portion of the app. Here, brands can directly interact with users, spur community involvement and encourage user generated content.

Unlockables

As more tools, 3d models, colors and patterns become available, users could potentially have to unlock them, by completing specific prompts or challenges, coming across them in the world, collaborating with others or by finding an Easter Egg that uses something they haven’t acquired yet. This would give them even more reason to go out, mingle with other users and hunt for Easter Eggs.

Art Dropping

Contrary to an Easter Egg, an Art Drop would be a unique piece of AR Art that could be collected only by the first person to find it. A screen would display the ones that have been dropped nearby and the countdown until they are gone. The collected Art Drops can be proudly displayed in your profile and collecting enough can give access to unique tools and patterns.

Challenges

Challenges can be used to incentivize specific user behavior, that will get them more engaged, keep returning to Scapes and help mitigate their loneliness, giving unlockables as rewards for doing so. These can range from seasonal themed prompts for the art they are constructing to location based ones or even involving Easter Egg discovery or collaboration with strangers. Challenges can also be sponsored by other companies, governments and institutions as a form of revenue for Scapes.

Groups

Like-minded artists, friends or people with similar interests can form together groups and create special Easter Eggs with their group symbol that only they can add to. Groups can battle each other in group art contests and unlock exclusive perks for their members.

Links

SCAD + Google - Scapes

SCAD CLC 2017