Detours & Deviations
Detours & Deviations is a dynamic world perpetually reshaped by memories. Players traverse a landscape, where their actions give birth to "memories" that, in turn, influence the evolving environment. Different experiences converge and intertwine, creating a collective journey that never ends. The project's ambition is to manifest the evolution of memories through AI-driven, procedural spatial reconstructions, and to allow players the freedom to explore an ever-evolving narrative woven with their own and others' memories.
The perpetual transformation of the space is closely tied to the presence of agents, referred to as "actors," who serve as custodians of various scenes, encapsulating and gathering memories imbued with subconscious behaviors. These actors possess distinctive personalities and methods for shaping their surroundings. Each begins their journey within a designated region but may venture into other territories, either to spark events or influence the inclinations of fellow actors.
Ahmed
In Ahmed's domain, every action by players becomes a catalyst for the perpetual metamorphosis of the environment. Ahmed captures and compiles memories infused with players' subconscious behaviors—ranging from movement speeds to footsteps and pauses—and translates them into spatial tendencies to create a spatial memory. When Ahmed sparks events in other realms or influences fellow actors, players may encounter imperfect copies of elements they observed before, as Ahmed prefers to record things in a rather casual manner.
Drawings & Diagrams
Ahmed is an actor that traces a pattern but they do that in a rather casual manner which results in misalignments and transformations. The portrait of Ahmed is made by tracing a rectangle over and over again. Each time the tracing referred to the previous one but shifted a little. The more tracings there are, the easier it gets to lose track of the lines, and that influences the consistency of the tracings. The coverage of the tracings ultimately becomes a floor plan of a gallery. Ahmed collects data such as player traveling direction, velocity, and attention, and passes it to the space itself, which contains a series of boolean operations.
Portraits of Ahmed, m23, & the Man with Three Names
200 × 124.5 × 10.5 cm (78.5 × 49 × 4 in)
Graphite, charcoal, acrylic, colored pencil, paper, spray paint, mylar
Flowchart of Ahmed
Decision Tree: The player’s path determines geometry generation.
Macro Generation from Actor and Player
Micro Operation of a Scripted Object
The Making of the Opening Scene
The opening scene, like many other scenes and assets in this project, was created by digitizing physical objects/models. For this particular scene, we scanned a physical model with photogrammetry, before combining the scanned model with video recordings. Since the scene is “projected," the player can easily sense the distortions and mismatches once they move away from the center of the projection (where we put the camera). This approach intends to blur the distinct sensory/experiential differences between physical and digital environments.
